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MIDSUMMER NIGHTS WITH THE 
GREAT DREAMER 



Midsummer Nights 

With the Great Dreamer 

A Pilgrim's Progress in the Twentieth Century 



BY JOHN HESTON WILLEY 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



"l^OS 



4*p 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS j 
Two Copies R 

MOV 23 1908 j 

_ Copi'nsnt entry j 
CLASS PL. XXc, Ho. 



Copyright, 1908, by 
EATON & MAINS 



The Author acknowledges the courtesy of the Century Company in permitting 
the use of illustration, in modified form, from the Rhead edition of Pilgrim's 
Progress for cover design. 



THE CALENDAR 

NIGHT THE FIRST 
The Start — Facing the Light I 

NIGHT THE SECOND 
The Wicket Gate — Burning the Bridges 19 

NIGHT THE THIRD 
At the Cross — Stripping for the Fight 35 

NIGHT THE FOURTH 
The House Beautiful — Going into Commission.. 51 

NIGHT THE FIFTH 
The First Battle 71 

NIGHT THE SIXTH 
Vanity Fair— Fighting on Low Levels 87 

NIGHT THE SEVENTH 
Doubting Castle — Fighting on High Levels 109 

NIGHT THE EIGHTH 
The Delectable Mountains — Rest and Refresh- 
ment 131 

NIGHT THE NINTH 
En Passant — The Man who Knows Everything 
and The Man who Knows Nothing 149 

NIGHT THE TENTH 
All Hail ! and Welcome 169 



JUST A WORD 



These chapters are the summary of a series of ad- 
dresses delivered in midsummer to a Sunday evening 
audience. 

II 

They are not intended to explain or to simplify the 
work done by the great Dreamer. No one feels called 
upon to clarify the water of the Pacific at Santa Cata- 
lina, or the April skies over Sorrento. Carrying coals 
to Newcastle, or pepper to Hindustan, can never be 
made a profitable trade. 

Ill 

They are not sermonettes since their author is not en- 
tirely ready to be called a preacherette ; and the literary 
monstrosity and homiletical freak known as a sermonette 
requires a preacherette as its perpetrator and explana- 
tion. They are not lectures ; the pulpit from which they 
were spoken is not a platform. They are not essays. 
The essay has a subject only, while these chapters have 
an object as well. What they are may better be judged 
in the reading, perhaps — if that seem worth while. 



IV 

According to the veracious and versatile Gulliver, the 
climenole at Laputa was a servant whose business it 
was to awaken the interest of his master in some im- 
portant matter that was being overlooked, or to call to 
mind some vital subject that was being forgotten. This 
book is willing to wear the livery of that servant, 



x JUST A WORD 

V 

Did not Ned Bratts come bouncing into Bedford As- 
size one " daft Midsummer's Day " to beg the special 
favor of being hanged at once to save his soul ? He 
had been reading Bunyan, or at any rate Browning had. 
He had received The Pilgrim's Progress from the blind 
child of the author (sic again Browning). Hear the 
sweating publican and Tabby his wife as they interpel- 
late the honorable Judges : 

"The Book, sirs — take and read! 
You have my history in a nutshell, — ay, indeed! 
It must off, my burden ! See, — slack straps and into pit, 
Roll, reach the bottom, rest, rot there — a plague on it ! 
For a mountain's sure to fall and bury Bedford Town, 
'Destruction' — that's the name, and fire shall burn it 

down! 
O, 'scape the wrath in time ! Time's now, if not too late. 
How can I pilgrimage up to the wicket gate?" 

And how successfully they pleaded, judge ye, when the 
puzzled Justice, " mopping brow and cheek," thunders 
to the lachrymose crowd, 

"Stop tears, or I'll indite 
All weeping Bedfordshire for turning Bunyanite !" 

There is a touch of Hogarth in the roaring poem, and 
there is also a large tribute to the Baptist tinker who 
dreamed his dream in Bedford Jail, in that this dream 
made so profound an impression upon the subtle mind 
of Robert Browning. 

VI 

The present trend is toward individualism. Biogra- 
phy is teaching by example as never before since the 
days of Plutarch. Fiction is building itself about per- 
sonality. Even Natural History deals with the particu- 



JUST A WORD xi 

lar instead of the universal, the individual instead of the 
species. Baloo the sleepy brown bear, Wahb the com- 
placent grizzly, Krag the Kootenay ram, are making this 
generation " rich with the spoils of nature " as stately 
tome and multi-volumed cyclopedia never could have 
done. Bunyan's Christian, like Goldsmith's village 
preacher, may perhaps not only allure to brighter 
worlds, but also lead the way. 



VII 



The Rev. Joseph Cook once said, "What is new is 
not true, and what is true is not new." This is a nat- 
ural blunder of the habitual phrase-maker. The Pil- 
grim's Progress is true and it is new. It is damp from 
the press. A real truth is always current. Those 
whom the gods love, no longer die young; they live 
young always. The hero of the dream has kept pace 
with the centuries. His eye is not dim, his natural 
force is not abated. He is still on the march. We 
catch a glimpse of his sturdy figure as he passes the 
window of our breakfast room. We make no apology, 
therefore, for a resurrection. We have profaned no 
cemetery and violated no hie jacet. We met the good 
man on the King's highway and invited him into the 
pulpit. Whether or not he is at home there remains to 
be seen. 



NIGHT THE FIRST 
THE START -FACING THE LIGHT 



The Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the only book 
about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the 
educated minority has come over to the opinion of the 
common people. — Macaulay. 

The second greatest book in the English language. 
— Newell D wight Hillis. 

I know of no book, the Bible being excepted as above 
all comparison, which, according to my judgment and 
experience, I could so safely recommend as teaching and 
embracing the whole saving truth, according to the mind 
that was in Christ Jesus, as The Pilgrim's Progress. — 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 




NIGHT THE FIRST 
The Start — Facing the Light 

HE Bible, Foxe's Book of Mar- 
tyrs, and Bedford Jail are re- 
sponsible for the world's master- 
piece in religious literature. 
Given these three, together with 
a powerful untrained mind, and an ardent un- 
balanced temperament, and The Pilgrim's 
Progress is the result. What John Bunyan in- 
tended when he set out to write the book he did 
not himself know. 

When at the first I took my pen in hand 
Thus for to write, I did not understand 
That I at all should make a little book 
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook 
To make another ; which, when almost done, 
Before I was aware, I this begun. 

What he did produce changed the thinking of 
his age, and has exercised an irresistible charm 
in all succeeding ages. 

The method was not a new one. Spenser 
had delighted the gay court of Queen Elizabeth 
with the splendors of his Faerie Queene, its 
superb feast and its twelve adventurous 

3 



4 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

knights; but Bunyan knew nothing of the 
Faerie Queene. As early as the fourteenth 
century a work had appeared in French repre- 
senting human life as a pilgrimage; but Bunyan 
most probably never heard of this work. Our 
allegory came fresh and bubbling from his 
heart. To the great scandal of many of his 
Puritan associates, to be sure : "It was a vain 
story, a mere romance about giants and lions 
and goblins and warriors, sometimes fighting 
with monsters, and sometimes regaled by fair 
ladies in stately palaces." 

But it took the world by storm. It has be- 
come a part of our literary thinking; not to 
know it is to be uneducated. Its characters are 
real men and women. The Pilgrim himself 
is alive. We may meet him any day. Hopeful, 
and Faithful, and Ignorance, and Mercy, and 
Great Heart, and Giant Despair are old ac- 
quaintances. They are historical. We know 
how they looked and just what they will say 
when they begin to talk. 

These are the men and women among whom 
we are to walk for a few weeks, and may they 
reveal to us the dangers of the path, the secrets 
of a larger success, and the way that leads to 
the Celestial City! When introduced to our 
hero he has a book in his hand, and when he 
reads in this book he weeps and trembles. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 5 

AS I walked through the wilderness of 
this world, I lighted on a certain 
place where was a Den; and I laid 
me down in that place to sleep: and as I 
slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and 
behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, 
standing in a certain place, with his face 
from his own house, a Book in his hand, 
and a great burden upon his back. I 
looked, and saw him open the Book, and 
read therein ; and, as he read, he wept and 
trembled; and not being able longer to 
contain, he brake out with a lamentable 
cry, saying, "What shall I do?" 



Of course, we do not need to be told that this 
Book is the Bible. We are, however, hardly 
ready for the results that follow from its read- 
ing. The popular ideas on the subject prepare 
us to expect something different. Almost 
everybody goes to the Bible for comfort. 
Whatever be the life a man is leading, however 
careless of God, however indifferent to truth, 
when emergency comes he expects the Bible to 
stay him. This is the strong tower into which 
he may run and be safe. Here, he is per- 
suaded, are the wells of salvation from which 
water is always to be drawn with joy. 

But the Bible is not always a cooling summer 
drink ; it is not always a sedative. It is some- 



6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

times a drastic tonic. It is sometimes, indeed, 
the surgeon's knife, quick and powerful, and 
sharper than a two-edged sword. It does not 
always meet us with the hand-shake of a friend. 
Sometimes it is the grip of an officer, fierce and 
peremptory, and' it means that we have been 
breaking the law. The Book has failed if 
sometimes it does not cut the ground from un- 
der our feet and make us feel that we are slip- 
ping into the abyss. "Is not my word like as 
a fire ? saith the Lord ; and like a hammer that 
breaketh the rock in pieces ?" 

And the fear awakened by reading the Bible 
is just as real now as in the days of Bunyan. 
The ground of this fear is somewhat changed 
and its manifestations different, but the emo- 
tion itself is still a phase of religious experience. 
Our fathers were afraid of God. They bor- 
rowed many of their conceptions of Deity from 
paganism. They thought him capable of un- 
speakable cruelty. They accused him of the 
crime of torturing little children in hell fire, 
and tried to believe it was right because he did 
it. They read all this in the Bible. 

We still read terrible things in the Book, but 
they are truths about ourselves and our possi- 
bilities, and not vicious deeds of Israel's Je- 
hovah or revengeful paroxysms of a ruthless 
Judge. We understand better than ever the 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 7 

path of soul evolution laid down in the New 
Testament. We see in its pages the awful 
depth to which the soul can go. We realize 
that a man can send himself to a darker hell 
than any conceived by our Puritan forbears 
and supposed to have been invented by God. 

Ulrici suggests that our actions and our 
thoughts are building the spiritual body which 
we shall at some future day occupy. This tre- 
mendous idea we are finding in our Bible. And 
the ground of the modern Pilgrim's fear is the 
possibility that his building will be of wood, 
hay, and stubble ; his course will be a reversion 
to type, and his future a sinking into infinite 
depths of spiritual stagnation and atrophy, to 
which there comes no to-morrow and from 
which there can be no return. 

This man whose fortune we are to follow 
had a burden upon his back. He had just dis- 
covered that burden, and he cries out to his 
family, "I am undone by reason of this burden 
that lieth upon me." And yet he had carried 
it all his life. It was his sin, and sin is no 
more real when we are conscious of it than 
when we do not dream of its existence. The 
sick man who knows that he is sick may not be 
any worse than the man who is sick and who 
does not know it. Better have the eyes open. 
Better know the truth. If there is a rock in 



8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

the channel, better locate it and steer the ship 
clear of it. It is the ocean derelict, the drift- 
ing hulk that refuses to be charted; it is this 
which baffles the skill of the pilot. If there is 
a broken rail ahead, let us learn it at once and 
stop the train. If there is lightning lurking in 
the clouds over Sodom, better take the angels 
into the house overnight and hear from their 
lips the dark chapter of to-morrow's doom. If 
there is sin in the soul, better have some one 
point it out to us. The prayer of the psalmist, 
"Who can discern his errors? Clear thou me 
from hidden faults," is a good, wholesome 
prayer. There is a vast undiscovered country 
within, far-lying and obscure, and in these re- 
mote and untraveled provinces may lurk many 
a lawbreaker, many a foe to God and light. 

It is at the bottom of the awful canyon we 
find the mighty Colorado rushing toward the 
sea. It is far down in the dark soil that we 
must look for the roots of the tree. And our 
sins so often lurk in the shadows, crouch in the 
far depths, and we ourselves may not dream of 
their existence. 



Below the surface streams shallow and light 
Of what we say we feel ; below the stream 
As light of what we think we feel, there flows 
With noiseless current strong, obscure, and deep 
The central stream of what we feel indeed. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 9 

Thus we meet our hero, clothed in rags, with 
his face set away from his home, and thus he 
encounters one named Evangelist, who hears 
his story. 

I SAW also that he looked this way and 
that way, as if he would run; yet he 
stood still, because, as I perceived, he 
could not tell which way to go. I looked 
then, and saw a man named Evangelist 
coming to him, who asked, "Wherefore 
dost thou cry?" 

He answered, "Sir, I perceive, by the 
Book in my hand, that I am condemned to 
die, and after that to come to judgment; 
and I find that I am not willing to do the 
first, nor able to do the second." 

Then said Evangelist, "Why not willing 
to die ; since this life is attended with so 
many evils?" The man answered, "Be- 
cause I fear that this burden that is upon 
my back will sink me lower than the grave, 
and I shall fall into Tophet. And, sir, if I 
be not fit to go to prison, I am not fit to 
go to judgment, and from thence to execu- 
tion ; and the thoughts of these things make 
me cry." 

Then said Evangelist, "If this be thy 
condition, why standest thou still?" He 
answered, "Because I know not whither 
to go." Then he gave him a parchment roll, 



io MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

and there was written within, "Flee from 
the wrath to come." 

The man, therefore, read it, and, look- 
ing upon Evangelist very carefully, said, 
"Whither must I fly?" Then said Evan- 
gelist, pointing with his finger over a very 
wide field, "Do you see yonder wicket 
gate?" The man said, "No." Then said 
the other, "Do you see yonder shining 
light?" He said, "I think I do." Then 
said Evangelist, "Keep that light in your 
eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt 
thou see the gate; at which, when thou 
knockest, it shall be told the3 what thou 
shalt do." So I saw in my dream that the 
man began to run. 

Note that the pilgrim could not see the 
wicket gate. He was not even positively sure 
that he could see the light which indicated the 
locality of the gate. What now ! Shall he say, 
"Thank you, my friend; I do not take things 
on trust. The gate may be there as you say, 
but I would rather see it before I start" ? This 
would not be psychologically possible. Such a 
mental attitude would have made what the crit- 
ics call an unnatural situation. Men who are 
stirred by deep emotions do not stop to argue ; 
do not split metaphysical hairs or weigh proba- 
bilities. Quibbles and sophistries and the bal- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER n 

ancing of evidence may do for the debating so- 
ciety, or the theological seminary ; but we want 
the fireman when the house is on fire, and the 
pilot when the ship is running down upon the 
rocks, and a real God when the soul is in con- 
scious sin. 

God has no trouble with a man who realizes 
how little he can do for himself. So long as we 
think we can save ourselves we are apt to be a 
little exacting. We want to make our own 
terms. We stipulate to march out of our aban- 
doned defenses with all the honors of war. We 
want the wicket gate in full sight when we start 
and a cleared, open track all the way to the 
gate. There are so many conditions we are 
ready to make before the iron enters the soul ; 
so many genteel devices, so many dilettante 
alternatives. The Church of the Heavenly 
Rest just around the corner is headquarters for 
this ad referendum faith. The Society for 
Ethical Culture is good neutral ground on 
which to treat with the spiritual powers that be. 
But, brother, when the sense of sin gets hold of 
you — as pray that it will some day — when all 
your life seems to have been a desolate failure, 
then you will make any sacrifice, will take any 
path, will flee to any gate, seen or unseen. 

And so the pilgrim starts and an adventure 
meets him at the very beginning. 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

NOW, I saw in my dream that just 
as they had ended this talk they 
drew near to a very miry slough, 
that was in the midst of the plain; and 
they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly 
into the bog. The name of the slough was 
Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed 
for a time, being grievously bedaubed with 
the dirt; and Christian, because of the 
burden that was on his back, began to sink 
in the mire. 

Then said Pliable, "Ah ! neighbor Chris- 
tian, where are you now?" 
"Truly," said Christian, "I do not know." 
At this Pliable began to be offended, 
and angrily said to his fellow, "Is this the 
happiness you have told me all this while 
of? If we have such ill speed at our first 
setting out, what may we expect betwixt 
this and our journey's end? May I get 
out again with my life, you shall possess 
the brave country alone for me." And 
with that he gave a desperate struggle or 
two, and got out of the mire on that side 
of the slough which was next to his own 
house. So away he went, and Christian 
saw him no more. 



There are two of them now, it seems. The 
unsaved man seeking salvation has begun to try 
to save other men. Pliable came persuading 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



13 



him to return and has himself been persuaded 
to go on the same journey. Before our hero 
knows Christ he has become a preacher of 
Christ; seeking the light, he has inspired an- 
other to become also a seeker of the light. 

A recent book by a celebrated writer on so- 
cial questions sneers amiably at John Bunyan 
and his dream. The allegory, we are told, is 
not modern. Christian was a poor, selfish 
creature who wanted to be saved and was ready 
to sacrifice everything and everybody to obtain 
that salvation. He started out alone to find 
good. He was manifestly and ingloriously 
less than the Frisian king who, when told by 
the bishop that his ancestors were probably in 
hell, answered, "Then I want none of your reli- 
gion. I am going to stand by the family." 

The Philippian jailer, when the earthquake 
came, smitten with conviction, getting a sudden 
glimpse of God, cries out, "What shall I do to 
be saved ?" Ah, he does not know any better ; 
he thinks his own salvation is the prime need 
of the universe. He imagines that all the 
majesty and miracle of that notable night, the 
shuddering earth, the tottering walls, the grind- 
ing doors, were just to save his cheap little soul. 
Saul of Tarsus, broad-brained, clear-visioned, 
stricken to the earth before the blaze of the 
Eternal, gets a glimpse of a larger situation and 



14 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

problem. He cries out in the hunger of his 
soul, not "What shall I do to be saved?" but 
"What wilt thou have me to do ?" Not for self, 
not to purchase peace of mind, not that he may 
find a smooth path for his feet ; but to the honor 
of Him whom he had been dishonoring and 
for the sake of the world he had been despising. 

"Wherefore," says our social critic, "Chris- 
tian should have remained in the City of De- 
struction, and made of it a city of Good. In- 
stead of seeking to escape he should have 
striven to convert. He was running away 
from the Augean stables, he was shifting the 
world back to the shoulders of Atlas." 

Surely it is not given unto all men to under- 
stand visions. Our shoemaker who knows his 
last is taking exception to other portions of 
Apelles's picture. Poor old Dreamer, how his 
poet soul would groan could he know how his 
dream is unrhymed and unreasoned by our 
modern Gradgrinds ! The City of Destruction 
represents not the world, but a spiritual con- 
dition, and had Christian remained within its 
walls our fable would have died a-borning. 
Out from this city did he go with his face set 
toward the morning, nor did he go alone. 

So our Bunyan is thoroughly modern on this 
page of his book. The criticism noted is nar- 
row and unjust. Christian lays the matter be- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 15 

fore his family at the very outset. In the sec- 
ond part of the book, his wife calls to mind how 
she did harden her heart against his loving per- 
suasions. And now, before the burden has 
been taken from his back, or the tears wiped 
from his eyes, he has begun to strive with his 
neighbors. Christian and Pliable walking side 
by side prove the fellowship of the faith ; prove 
that the first impulse of the saved is salvation ; 
prove that the new law of social service was 
recognized in Bedford Jail long years before 
the twentieth century had given it a name and 
hailed it as the exponent of a religious epoch. 

Together they stumble in the Slough of De- 
spond. This is a famous quagmire. It lies across 
the way to every great undertaking. Colum- 
bus waded through it for ten years as he wan- 
dered up and down Europe looking for a ship 
with which to sail the Western seas. Wash- 
ington slept in its frozen slime at Valley Forge. 
Many and many a young man or young woman 
longing for an education has found the Slough 
of Despond on the way to the college campus, 
and has stumbled into it more than once before 
the college course has been finished. It repre- 
sents here the doubts and fears that assail the 
seeking heart ; it is the reaction from hope, the 
backward swing of the pendulum, the fierce 
insidious undertow that crouches at the base of 



16 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

the highest breakers and drags treacherously 
toward the sea depths. 

If you will listen to the two travelers you will 
notice that they were talking about heaven. 
Crowns of glory were flashing before their 
imagination. Seraphim and cherubim were 
standing in dazzling ranks about them ; golden 
harps were filling their confused souls with the 
ravishing harmonies of eternity. They were 
transported, bewildered, hypnotized, and Pli- 
able said eagerly, "Glad I am to hear of these 
things, my good companion ; come, let us mend 
our pace." And down they went into the bog, 
and the stifling ooze and mire put an end to 
their ecstasies. 

Better had they been minding their steps. 
Field glasses and telescopes and meridian 
circles, by which we note far-off horizons, are 
all right when the going is clear ; but it is good 
policy to watch the path just ahead when the 
way leads through the marsh. There is a time 
for heaven and there is a time for earth ; a time 
for toil and a time for triumph. The Lord of 
the vineyard paid full wages to the laborers 
who went in late because they made no con- 
ditions but left it all to his justice. God likes 
to be trusted to do what is right ; and the case 
of our unfortunate travelers shows how unto- 
ward may be the fate of those who count over 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER i 7 

their wages before they have taken up their 
tools. 

Moreover, it illustrates yet more fully the 
advantage of thorough conviction. Pliable 
floundered back to the starting place, while 
Christian pushed his way to the further side. 
Pliable had never felt himself to be a sinner, 
never had bowed under the weight of the bur- 
den, never had wept over the awful sentence 
of doom in the Book. It was a summer day's 
ramble to him. He had joined this enterprise 
because it seemed a proper thing to do, and had 
started to heaven because he could go in good 
company. "He that hath slight thoughts of 
sin never had great thoughts of God," said one 
of the Church fathers in his dusky cell at 
Bethlehem. And it might be said that no one 
can have great thoughts of God without having 
also an overwhelming sense of the sinfulness 
of sin, and that no one can acceptably come to 
God who minifies and palliates sin. 

Even if we grant, with the new way of 
thinking, that "Christian consciousness is un- 
dergoing a change"; that "the supreme ques- 
tion is not 'Am I saved ?' but 'What am I good 
for?' " that "the Christian world needs a new 
sense of guilt," this does not alter the con- 
ditions. It may change the emphasis but it 
does not weaken it. Let it be a new sense of 



18 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

guilt or an old sense of guilt so that it be a 
clear sense of guilt. Let it be individual or 
communal, personal or social, so it drive the 
soul to God in helpless prayer. 

Then shall we have revivals. Then will our 
converts live and not need to be fed on the 
skim-milk of church socials, and looked after 
every day by a kindergarten committee whose 
business it is to see that the milk agrees with 
them and to keep them supplied with soothing 
syrup. Then will the sloughs in the path be 
but unpleasant incidents. "Only a little 
cloud," as the lion-hearted Athanasius said 
after forty years of conflict with the Roman 
emperors, twenty years of which had been spent 
in exile — "only a little cloud," as once more 
by the edict of Valens he went into the desert 
and sat himself down in his father's tomb. 



NIGHT THE SECOND 

THE WICKET GATE — BURNING THE 
BRIDGES 



I stood outside the gate, 
A poor, wayfaring child; 

Within my heart there beat 
A tempest loud and wild. 

"Mercy!" I loudly cried, 
"O give me rest from sin !' 

"I will," a voice replied; 
And Mercy let me in. 

In Mercy's guise I knew 
The Saviour long abused, 

Who often sought my heart, 
And wept when I refused. 

O, what a blest return 
For ignorance and sin! 

I stood outside the gate, 
And Jesus let me in. 



NIGHT THE SECOND 
The Wicket Gate — Burning the Bridges 



ISESSrJE accompany our hero tonight 
3$3 jj through the second stage of his 
1 journey. In the meantime he 
has met with sundry and various 
adventures. These are, how- 
ever, in the shadow and our camera does not 
reach them. We hasten to meet him at the 
Wicket Gate. This is the place of self-com- 
mittal. He has crossed the bridge, it must be 
burned behind him. He has beached his ships, 
they must now be broken up. On one side of 
this Gate is Today, on the other side is To- 
morrow. 

SO in process of time Christian got up 
to the gate. Now, over the gate 
there was written, "Knock, and it 
shall be opened unto you." 

He knocked, therefore, more than once 
or twice, saying, 

"May I now enter here ? Will he within 
Open to sorry me, though I have been 
An undeserving rebel ? Then shall I 
Not fail to sing his lasting praise on high." 

At last there came a grave person to the 
gate, named Good-will, who asked who 
21 



22 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

was there, and whence he came, and what 
he would have. 

Chr. Here is a poor burdened sinner. I 
come from the City of Destruction, but am 
going to Mount Zion, that I may be deliv- 
ered from the wrath to come. I would 
therefore, sir, since I am informed that by 
this gate is the way thither, know if you 
are willing to let me in. 

Notice how transparently honest the man is. 
He attempts no concealment. He takes the 
risk of candor. Everything depends upon 
passing this gate, yet he makes no effort to con- 
ciliate the gate-keeper. He does not know but 
that his confession will shut the gate in his 
face, yet the confession is made. There is a 
time when the soul must speak out, when the 
burdened heart must unburden itself. Upon 
this necessity of our nature the Romish con- 
fessional is built and has exercised its tre- 
mendous power for centuries. That men and 
women have been benefited by this institution 
cannot for a moment be doubted. But there is 
a manifest weakness and incompleteness about 
it as it usually obtains. You go to Washing- 
ton to lay an important matter before the Presi- 
dent and you are not satisfied to see his secre- 
tary only. That which means life or death to 
you must be taken straight to headquarters. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



23 



Yet there are thousands who talk with the 
priest who might talk with Jesus Christ; who 
kneel in the confessional and speak to a man 
when in their closets they might whisper in the 
ears of God. 

Nor did Christian take refuge in the short- 
comings of others. The porter gave him an 
excellent opportunity to do this. "Alas, poor 
man!" he said of Pliable, "is the celestial glory 
of so little esteem with him that he counteth it 
not worth running the hazards of a few difficul- 
ties to obtain it?" What a splendid opening 
this was ! Why, to be sure, he was better than 
Pliable. He had not thought of that before. 
What a miserable creature Pliable was, after 
all ! Just let attention be fixed upon him and 
kept there, and perhaps his own rags now so 
emphatically in evidence will be forgotten, and 
that wretched burden will be unseen. But we 
are dealing with a real man, and a real man 
never hides behind the failures of other men; 
never imagines that he will be rated solid if he 
can show that somebody else is selling short; 
never excuses himself for not belonging to the 
Church because "there are hypocrites in the 
Church." Hypocrites in the Church, do you 
say? Yes, I confess that is true. But that is 
a very small segment of the truth. Phillips 
Brooks was also in the Church, and Cookman, 



24 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



and John Howard the friend of prisoners, and 
David Livingstone the savior of Africa, and 
Stephen, who died praying for his murderers, 
and John the Beloved — and Jesus of Nazareth. 

The cracks in the foundation of our neigh- 
bor's house will not help ours to stand. The 
frost that blights our neighbor's orchard will 
not make our fruit crop larger, especially if our 
trees grow just over the hedge from his. 
When the volcano pours its deluge of fire down 
the peaceful slopes, and buries great cities un- 
der the ashes, it will not save our home, if we 
have builded there, to know that other homes 
are clustered along the same hillsides and are 
exposed to the same dangers. The hypocrisy 
of others does not excuse our neglect. More- 
over, it is a pitiful, unmanly thing to insult the 
dying Jesus day after day by reminding him 
that there are many who are called after his 
name who do not seem to be much benefited by 
his sufferings and death. 

And so Christian makes no apology for him- 
self. He does not seek to palliate his offenses. 
With Othello, he says, "Speak of me as I am ; 
nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in 
malice." He puts the blame exactly where it 
belongs. He does not say that he has had no 
chance to do better; that his parents were too 
strict, or they were to easy; that his environ- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 25 

ment has been unfortunate; that he has been 
beguiled by business associates or surprised by 
temptations which he did not understand. If 
he had lived in this century and had read 
Ibsen or Maarten Maartens, he would have 
learned there that all his evils were inherited. 
Rosmer never laughed because his family never 
laughed. The "Lady of the Sea" is to go mad 
because her mother was mad, and so must Ken- 
neth Gray. Indeed, the last-named was actu- 
ally mad until it was shown that madness was 
not a family trait. 

Wallace or John Fiske or Haeckel would 
have told him that he had been living too long 
in the City of Destruction; that environment 
had bound the burden upon his shoulders and 
planted the evil in his heart. According to 
Haeckel the freedom of the will is a pure dog- 
ma based on delusion. Every act of the will is 
as absolutely determined by the organization of 
the individual, and as dependent on the mo- 
mentary condition of his environment, as every 
other activity. The freedom of God even is 
attacked. Schopenhauer calls God a Blind 
Will. Hartmann calls him the Sublimated 
Consciousness. Matthew Arnold speaks of 
the Eternal Not-Ourselves, and Spencer of the 
Unascertained Something. A modern writer 
declares that if all this be true, then it is as log- 



26 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

ical to exhort a man to change his creed as to 
grow six feet high. It is as unreasonable to 
blame him for being a rogue as it would be to 
blame him for having red hair. 

What a wild sea of flying scud and bleak 
sky lines we are driven upon when we trip the 
anchor of Free Will ! It is the hopeless pagan- 
ism of the City of Dreadful Night. 

The world rolls round forever like a mill ; 
It grinds out death and life and good and ill ; 
It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will. 

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim: 
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim; 
That it is quite indifferent to him. 

Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith? 

It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath; 

Then grinds him back into eternal death. 

How is this any better than the crass fatalism 
of Omar the tentmaker, the voice out of 
twelfth-century pantheism, the fetich of twen- 
tieth-century dilettanteism ? 

We are no other than a moving row 
Of Magic shadow-shapes that come and go 
Round with this Sun-illumined Lantern, held 
In midnight by the Master of the show. 

Impatient pieces of the game he plays 
Upon this checkerboard of nights and days; 
Hither and thither, moves and checks and slays, 
And one by one back in the closet lays. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER ^ 

But the Dreamer in Bedford Jail had a 
healthy mind on this subject. His Pilgrim is, 
and has been, his own master. If there is any 
blame he alone will bear it. How many Eves 
there are handy when we essay Adam's un- 
manly trick of dodging responsibility! We 
can burn Rome without any care or compunc- 
tion, as there are always Christians enough to 
bear the blame. 

But why should our pilgrim seek to excuse 
himself? Why should we? If the physician 
is skillful enough to heal us, let us tell him all 
the symptoms. If God can save, then let him 
save us just as we are. 

There's a wideness in God's mercy- 
Like the wideness of the sea. 

And on that sea of mercy we float as a little 
ship floats on the Atlantic. Plenty of sea 
room, and the waters are deep, and the breezes 
that blow are fresh from the fields of glory, and 
the beat and throb of the sunny waves is the 
beat and throb of God's great heart that is full 
of compassion for our helplessness. 

O, the little birds sang East, 
And the little birds sang West, 
And I smiled to think God's greatness 
Flowed around our incompleteness, 
Round our restlessness his rest, 



28 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

There is power in Christ. He can save to 
the uttermost. The dying sinner crucified with 
Jesus made but one prayer and all his sins were 
washed away in the blood that trickled down 
from the pierced brow, and he fell asleep on 
the cross to wake up in paradise. So let us be 
honest with God and be ready to take the con- 
sequences of our honesty. The state governor 
visited the penitentiary one day for the pur- 
pose of setting free some one prisoner. He 
passed from cell to cell investigating the sev- 
eral cases. One man was found who was sent 
there (according to his own story) through 
the prejudices of the judge. Another had an 
enemy who had made a false accusation. An- 
other had been deceived by his business part- 
ner and so was the innocent accessory to 
wrong. At last one man was found who had 
no excuse to make. He had nothing to say. 
He had done wrong and deserved all the pun- 
ishment he was receiving. "Strike off this 
man's chains," said the governor. "Send him 
out of here and let him go. He is the only 
criminal in the place and will ruin the charac- 
ter of every man inside the walls." "If we 
confess our sins, he is faithful and just to for- 
give us our sins, and to cleanse us from all 
unrighteousness." 

Just as manifest is the honesty of God. Be- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 29 

fore Christian goes another step he must know 
the character of his going. Before he commits 
himself he must understand the meaning and 
the consequences of such committal. 

GOOD-WILL. We make no objections 
against any, notwithstanding all 
that they have done before they 
came hither. They are "in no wise cast out," 
and therefore, good Christian, come a little 
way with me, and I will teach thee about 
the way thou must go. Look before thee ; 
dost thou see this narrow way? That is 
the way thou must go; it was cast up by 
the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his 
apostles ; and it is as straight as a rule can 
make it. This is the way thou must go. 

"But," said Christian, "are there no turn- 
ings or windings, by which a stranger may 
lose his way?" 

Good-will. Yes, there are many ways 
butt down upon this, and they are crooked 
and wide. But thus thou mayest distinguish 
the right from the wrong, the right only 
being straight and narrow. 

Of course, we know that the word "strait" in 
the gospel narrative means narrow, but let us 
allow Bunyan his own interpretation. 

It is a straight path. The Christian must be 
a straight man. "Let thine eyes look right on, 



30 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. 
Turn not to the right hand nor to the left." 
There is no room for a crooked transaction in 
the way of eternal life. Are you selling goods ? 
Then say what you know about those goods 
and take the chances with your customer. Are 
you working for a salary? It may be under 
the eight-hour system or the ten-hour system, 
but your employer is paying you for sixty min- 
utes in each one of those hours ; be sure that he 
gets the worth of his money. Are you in a 
position to affect the reputation of some man 
or woman by word or sign? Then this way, 
which is marked out by rule, is passable only 
by those who keep their lips by rule, even the 
Golden Rule, which demands that we "do unto 
others as we would have them do unto us." I 
have known some roads so crooked that you 
would be facing every point of the compass in 
a few minutes' walk. The man who visited 
Boston for the first time came back to the hotel 
out of breath, declaring that the streets were 
so tangled that he had met himself coming 
around a sharp corner several times. The road 
to heaven is better engineered. It lieth beau- 
tifully mathematically straight between its be- 
ginning and its end. He whose face is toward 
evil is standing still, or he is going away from 
the light. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 31 

Moreover, it is so much easier to go straight. 
Crooked lines are complicated lines. Yonder 
in New York at Union Square is the "dead 
man's curve." As the Broadway car swings 
into that curve the conductor always calls out, 
"Hold hard !" There is jolt and jar that does 
not come on the straight track. Railroad 
companies will pay thousands of dollars, 
build bridges and tunnel mountains, just to 
straighten out a few miles of the roadway. 
One train on the New York Central and one 
on the Pennsylvania make the distance to Chi- 
cago in eighteen hours — an average of fifty-six 
miles an hour — outstripping the Sud Express 
in France at fifty miles, the Flying Scots- 
man at fifty and seven tenths, and the Cale- 
donian at fifty and one tenth. There is one 
stretch on the Central as straight as an arrow 
where the Empire State Express has made one 
hundred and twelve miles an hour — swifter 
than the wind, smoother than the summer 
stream. It is the curve that costs; the awful 
tempestuous swing of the whizzing train on 
the crooked track that grinds the rails and 
strains the machinery. 

Look back into your life. How little trouble 
you have made for yourself or for others when 
on the spiritual air line! How little you have 
done to be ashamed of when going straight! 



32 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

The remorse, the stingings of conscience, the 
awful torture of self-condemnation — all these 
have come through side excursions. You 
would like to go back and live over some of 
your life ? How often have we longed for that 
privilege! But it is not the straight places 
that fill us with these regrets and longings, or 
that we would like to change. Has an audit- 
ing officer been appointed to examine your 
books? You have no shadow of fear about 
those pages where two and two make four, and 
where one hundred cents are counted to the dol- 
lar. Since the days of Euclid and of John 
Bunyan and of Jesus, the straight line has been 
regarded as "the shortest distance between two 
points." 

This is the only sure road to wealth ; it is not 
wise to attempt to go across lots. "Get-rich- 
quick" roads are unengineered roads and are 
not always passable. Insolvency or the peni- 
tentiary lies that way. Are you planning for a 
good time in this world ? Keep to the straight 
path. There are plenty of flowers in this path, 
and fewer ditches and quagmires. In my first 
years in the ministry, when I was just begin- 
ning to preach, I had occasion to speak from 
the words used by Ezekiel in reference to the 
mysterious living creatures seen in his vision 
down by the river Chebar — "And they went 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 33 

every one straight forward." These words 
were applied to the Christian life, and the fol- 
lowing analysis was made : 

i. They went every one; that is, there was 
not an idler among them. 

2. They went every one straight; that is, 
they knew the path, and kept it. 

3. They went every one straight forward; 
that is, it is in the things which are ahead that 
we are to find a realization of our ideals. 

Whatever improvement may be made homi- 
letically, the philosophy of the above is beyond 
impeachment. Keep straight and you will keep 
safe. Keep straight forward and you will walk 
into the light. 

And so God dealt squarely with the man and 
the man dealt squarely with God; and so the 
wicket gate was passed, and so our story goes 
bravely on to the cross which stands on the 
summit of the hill just ahead, and which we 
shall reach when next we meet again. 



NIGHT THE THIRD 

AT THE CROSS -STRIPPING FOR THE 
FIGHT 



Backward look across the ages and the beacon mo- 
ments see, 

That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through 
Oblivion's sea; 

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry 

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose 
feet earth's chaff must fly; 

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment 
hath passed by. 

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but 

record 
One death grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems 

and the Word; 
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 

throne, — 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the 

dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 

his own. 

— Lowell, "The Present Crisis." 




NIGHT THE THIRD 

At the Cross — Stripping for the Fight 

HE affairs of our Pilgrim are 
approaching a crisis. He set out 
with a very indefinite purpose. 
His heart was heavy, his con- 
science was restless, his life was 
a torment. He wanted to get away from 
himself. He was filled with the fever of es- 
cape. It was not so much what might be ahead 
as what was really behind. 

Starting for the Gate which led away from 
the past, which indeed might mark the limit of 
the past, he fell into the Slough. Even the 
future then had its threats. He passed the 
Gate, but he found not even here the hoped-for 
divorce from self and sin and yesterday. He 
was still himself. He bore with sinking shoul- 
ders the fatal burden. The House of the In- 
terpreter lay along the way with its chambers 
of imagery. Here are glimpses of a new world 
and of larger things — a world, indeed, between 
the City of Destruction and the City of Re- 
ward : a life to live that is vibrant with to-day, 
that is in the present tense ; unsombered by the 

37 



38 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

land of woe whence he had come, and unhaloed 
by the land of glory whither he was going ; and 
which was in itself just as important as either. 
He must live to-day though he die and enter 
the gates of the city to-morrow. 

He must now become a citizen of this world 
between worlds. It had its own battles, hence 
he must get ready for fighting. It imposed its 
own burdens, hence he must get rid of the one 
he is carrying. 

THEN I saw in my dream that Chris- 
tian asked him further if he could 
not help him off with his burden that 
was upon his back; for as yet he had not 
got rid thereof, nor could he by any means 
get it off without help. 

He told him, "As to thy burden, be 
content to bear it, until thou comest to 
the place of deliverance; for there it will 
fall from thy back of itself." 

Now, I saw in my dream that the high- 
way up which Christian was to go was 
fenced on either side with a wall and that 
wall was called Salvation. Up this way, 
therefore, did burdened Christian run, but 
not without great difficulty, because of the 
load on his back. 

He ran on thus till he came at a place 
somewhat ascending; and upon that place 
stood a cross, and a little below, in the 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 39 

bottom, a sepulcher. So I saw in my 
dream, that just as Christian came up with 
the cross, his burden loosed from off his 
shoulders, and fell from off his back, and 
began to tumble, and so continued to do 
till it came to the mouth of the sepulcher, 
where it fell in, and I saw it no more. 

Then was Christian glad and lightsome, 
and said, with a merry heart, "He hath 
given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his 
death." 

Thus the burden fell of its own accord. Do 
you know what that burden is? Ask the 
psalmist, and he says, "Mine iniquities are 
gone over mine head : as an heavy burden they 
are too heavy for me." Ask Tiberius, the foul 
and bloody emperor hiding in the island of 
Capri and writing the Roman Senate that the 
gods and goddesses could not in the future de- 
stroy him worse than he daily felt himself 
perishing. Ask Lady Macbeth, who hounds 
her husband to the murder of the King and 
who afterward walks the hall at midnight fast 
asleep, wild-eyed, haggard, feverishly trying 
to wash her hands, and muttering, "Who 
would have thought the old man to have had 
so much blood in him I" 

Christian had tried to remove the burden. 
He had heard of a Mr. Legality and had set 



4 o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

out to find him. He would ease his conscience 
by conforming to moral law. He had learned 
of a Mr. Civility who might help him. The 
courtesies and gallantries and urbanities of so- 
cial life might relieve the self-torment. But 
the burden was there and the portentous eternal 
question was, "What shall I do?" 

Burden-bearers of this age and congrega- 
tion, there is nothing for you to do. It is all 
done. You are but to accept Jesus the Doer and 
Saviour. The ark rests yonder in the valley, 
and the fountains of the great deep are broken 
up, and the floods are coming. There is safety 
only in the ark. The cross stands out upon the 
hilltops, and the burden is heavy and hopeless 
and ruinous. Look only to the cross. The 
Saviour of men died upon it. He died to re- 
move that very burden. He brought unthink- 
able power to the task. He grappled with the 
problem in the might of an infinite capacity. 
Accept this and the heart grows light, all sense 
of ill departs, and the burden topples into the 
abysses. 

It is a question of surrender. This is the su- 
preme meaning of the cross. The centuries of 
ecclesiasticism and of pedantic definition have 
lumbered the religious world with theories of 
the atonement. Each theological handicrafts- 
man has laid down his ground plan and pre- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 41 

pared his blue prints and demanded that the 
world build according to his lines. And it has 
meant death to deviate. But the cross means 
self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-burial. 
"Wiliest thou to be made whole?" contains the 
kernel of the gospel. When the human is ready 
to abdicate, the divine is ready to be enthroned. 
The easy yoke and the light burden are subject 
to our choice, and when we choose these we 
lose all others. God's servants need know no 
other master. Whatever the books may say, 
we have solved the problem of the atonement, 
when the soul is at one with God. 

The burden fell suddenly. There was a mo- 
ment when life was dark and the world was 
midnight. The next moment the sun was shin- 
ing and the birds were singing and it was 
broad day. This does not come to all, because 
all have not the same temperament, and all do 
not feel as Christian felt. 

The wise men of the schools have diverse 
ways of accounting for sudden conversions. 
For that there are such no one can deny. Saint 
Paul's experience proves this, and so scientists 
call his conversion "a discharging lesion of 
the occipital cortex." S. W. Hadley testifies 
that in a moment he "felt the glorious bright- 
ness of the noonday sun" shine into his heart. 
David Brainerd said, "While walking in a 



42 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

grove unspeakable glory seemed to open to the 
apprehension of my soul." These are unde- 
niable facts. They must be acknowledged and 
classified if not explained. It is, we are told, 
the sudden relaxation of the will, the reaction 
from the high nervous strain and the rush of 
feeling that follows such relaxation. "We 
drop down, give up, and don't care any longer," 
says Professor William James, of Harvard. 
"Let one do all in one's power and one's nerv- 
ous system will do the rest," declares Professor 
Starbuck, of California. "The passing of the 
soul," according to Carlyle, "from the everlast- 
ing No to the everlasting Yes through the cen- 
ter of Indifference." 

But whatever be the psychology of the 
change, the change comes, and it comes sud- 
denly where there has been the conviction of 
sin and the full resting of the soul upon Jesus 
Christ as Saviour from sin. 

This brings us back to the question of con- 
viction. Very few realize the sinfulness of sin 
as did John Bunyan. He felt with a vividness 
that we scarcely understand that the "heart is 
deceitful above all things, and desperately 
wicked." It was not a matter of creed, but of 
conviction. He did not learn this in the cate- 
chism from smiling and beribboned Sunday 
school teachers, or smug and complacent 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 43 

priests. He learned it in the night watches 
when he walked the fields, or amid the blue 
glare of the fierce lightning when to his fevered 
brain the God of the storm was abroad. He 
whose youthful follies and indiscretions have 
been smiled at and extenuated by his biog- 
raphers says: "I was the very ringleader in 
vice and ungodliness." 

When we have more overwhelming convic- 
tion of sin we will have more instantaneous 
conversions from sin. When there are more 
who are ready to say to God in an agony of 
self-accusation, "Thou hast laid me in the low- 
est pit, thy wrath lieth hard upon me," then 
there will be more to shout in the triumph of 
deliverance, "He brought me up also out of an 
horrible pit, out of the miry clay ; and he hath 
put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto 
our God." Let yourself down into the deep 
shadows, spare not, palliate not, apologize not, 
and the hand of God will bring you up and the 
kindling dawn will be glorious upon the moun- 
tains. Carry the crushing burden for a few 
days and it will suddenly be taken off. Sit 
down in the seventh chapter of Romans with 
Paul, who cried out in a passion of soul weari- 
ness and pain, "O wretched man that I am! 
who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?" and by and by you will be led into the 



44 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

eighth chapter on some Damascus Plain, amid 
the shining that will be above the brightness of 
the noonday sun. 

The burden was completely removed. Do 
you know Christian had no more burden as 
long as he lived? He walked untrammeled. 
He fought free-handed. His sins were gone. 
This is the glory of the Christian faith. Under 
its wing we go care-free and light. 

Is that too much to impose upon God, to ex- 
pect from God ? "The government shall be up- 
on his shoulders" ; surely our little burdens will 
not disturb him. "He measureth the waters in 
the hollow of his hand." There they are, the 
storming Atlantic, the vast unmapped, myste- 
rious Pacific, the seas that lash the coral strands 
of India, or that glitter in the icy sheen of the 
Northern Lights. In the hollow of his hand ! 
In the hollow of his hand ! "He weigheth the 
mountains in scales, and the hills in a bal- 
ance" — the Alps, and the Andes, and the awful 
lonely Himalayas, the cloud-walking Titans of 
the mystic East. And shall we fear lest we dis- 
tress and overburden him with our little daily 
cares ? 

And the burden rolled down the hillside until 
it came to the mouth of the sepulcher, where it 
fell in, and it was seen no more. So many of 
the world burdens have gone down into sepul- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 45 

chers. The Crusades swept from Europe to- 
ward Palestine; and the marshes of Hungary, 
and the waves of the Mediterranean, and the 
sword of Saladin destroyed the thousands, and 
into their graves went down with them the 
feudalism and tyrannies of the past. The 
Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century 
is one of the most awful pages of history. The 
people were slaughtered, the cities were laid in 
ashes, and central Europe became a vast ceme- 
tery. But in that cemetery were buried the 
political pretensions of the Papacy, and so the 
world was made free to worship God in its 
own chosen way. At Gettysburg and Fort 
Donelson and Cold Harbor were laid away 
thousands of the boys in blue and the boys in 
gray, and a hundred thousand hearts were 
broken when the smoke of battle cleared away ; 
but at the same time and in the same grave 
were laid away the rusty chains and bloody 
whips of American slavery, and never more 
shall the flag of the stripes and the stars wave 
over a man who can be sold on the auction 
block by his fellow man. It is a ghastly, ter- 
rific sight — these death-throes of evil, these in- 
furiate paroxysms of the race; but civilization 
has come that way, and civilization is worth 
all it has cost. 

And so the burden went out of sight. How 



46 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

vivid is the Bible language in which is de- 
scribed the removal of sin ! Hear it : "I have 
blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions." 
Can you find the clouds after the thunder has 
ceased and the leaves are shaking the remnants 
of the shower from their glistening coats and 
the storm has swept down the horizon ? 

"He will cast all our sins into the depths of 
the sea." Ah, how far down is that? Just 
north of Saint Thomas the lead sinks four 
miles before it touches bottom. The sailor who 
looks up at the volcanic mass of Sunday Island, 
hiding its head in the clouds, knows that sheer 
down from the foot of this rock the sea drops 
nearly six miles to its bottom : an awful plunge 
into awful depths where the loftiest mountain 
on the earth could be buried and not a trace be 
left! There are places where the bottom has 
not yet been reached ; vast abysses beyond the 
measurement of man. Tradition has it that 
an entire continent once slipped down into the 
sea gloom and left only a few islands to mark 
its burial place. The navies of the world, the 
mighty ships that "thunderstrike the walls of 
rock-built cities" — these move upon the surface 
during their little day and then go down to 
the unlighted depths. It is all dark and weird 
and uncanny in these still and awful deeps, and 
there our repented sins are to be buried. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



47 



"As far as the east is from the west, so far 
hath he removed our trespasses from us." Do 
you suppose the writer of these words had any 
conception of their vastness and majesty ? Per- 
haps with him "from east to west" meant from 
the Euphrates to the Mediterranean — perhaps 
from star to star as he saw the stars with the 
naked eye from the hilltops of Judea. He did 
not know what the ten-year-old boy knows 
now, that the nearest fixed stars are mighty 
suns so far away that their blaze is dwindled 
to a spark. He did not know that there are 
hundreds of millions of suns greater than ours, 
and that beyond this universe, the edges of 
which are so remote that thought is staggered 
as we try to conceive it — beyond this is a vast 
empty space, the desert that engulfs creation; 
and then beyond this void may be other uni- 
verses far more splendid than this of which we 
form a part. 

Suppose a mighty angel should take us in 
his arms and bear us away on a voyage of dis- 
covery; suppose that every beat of his wings 
swept him three thousand miles along, and 
that these wing strokes were made at the 
rate of two every second. The hero of 
Jules Verne journeyed round the world in 
eighty days. Miss Nellie Bly made the trip 
in seventy-two days. We would make the dis- 



4 8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

tance in four seconds. Now let the angel lift his 
gigantic pinions and start outward. Past the 
sun in four hours ! In five days, having sighted 
Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, we would have 
reached sturdy old Neptune pacing up and 
down his lonely beat on the border land of our 
system. Now take a long breath and hold 
hard, for, though the little earth has long since 
faded out of sight, the journey is but just be- 
gun. Like the ocean liner that has just passed 
down New York harbor and has left Sandy 
Hook on the right and Rockaway Beach on the 
left, the great sea is before us. Yonder twin- 
kling through vague distance is the nearest fixed 
star, and a hundred years will have gone, in 
spite of our tremendous speed, before we have 
reached it. And still ahead, and far over illim- 
itable spaces, are other stars and towering con- 
stellations and stupendous systems. Yea, after 
a thousand years have passed in which with our 
heavenly guide we have flashed on unceasingly, 
all about us afar and anear will blaze these 
mighty suns, for there is no end and there is no 
beginning to the universe of God. Out there in 
the bleak shadows of remoteness the sins we 
have forsaken are lost. They have no more 
dominion over us. They will never more find 
us ; they cannot reach our world ; they are gone 
and gone forever. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 4 9 

THEN he stood still a while to look 
and wonder; for it was very sur- 
prising to him that the sight of the 
cross should thus ease him of his burden. 
He looked therefore, and looked again, 
even till the springs that were in his head 
sent the waters down his cheeks. Now 
as he stood looking and weeping, behold 
three Shining Ones came to him and sa- 
luted him with "Peace be to thee." So 
the first said to him, "Thy sins be forgiven 
thee" ; the second stripped him of his rags, 
and clothed him "with change of raiment" ; 
the third also set a mark on his forehead 
and gave him a roll with a seal upon it, 
which he bade him look on as he ran, and 
that he should give it in at the Celestial 
Gate. 

Over in Manhattan there is a curbstone on 
one of the streets, and every year on a certain 
day a woman comes and kneels at this stone 
and renews her vows to God. One night years 
ago she was found there by a city missionary. 
There she gave her heart to God and by a 
miracle of grace was gloriously saved. There 
she found the cross. This is her Mecca — the 
dearest spot on earth to her, the place where the 
burden fell away and all her sins were forgiven. 
Have you such a memory as this? Have you 
found the cross — a place where you may go 



50 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

and say, "Here God for Christ's sake took away- 
all the sin out of my life" ? If so, you are safe ; 
you are ready to live the real life, you are ready 
to live the life that prepares for life. 

O sacred hour ! O hallowed spot ! 

Where love divine first found me ; 
Wherever falls my distant lot, 

My heart will linger round thee. 
And when from earth I rise to soar 

Up to my home in heaven, 
Down will I cast my eyes once more 

Where I was first forgiven. 



NIGHT THE FOURTH 

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL — GOING INTO 
COMMISSION 



One army of the living God, 

To his command we bow ; 
Part of his host have crossed the flood, 

And part are crossing now. 

E'en now by faith we join our hands 
With those that went before ; 

And greet the blood-besprinkled bands 
On the eternal shore. 



NIGHT THE FOURTH 




The House Beautiful — Going into 
Commission 

E spend this evening in the House 
Beautiful. This place of rest 
and refreshment stood hard by 
the way and was reached at the 
end of a long and trying day. 
"It was built by the Lord of the hill for the re- 
lief and security of pilgrims." According to 
our scheme this house represents the Church. 
Christian has entered the wicket gate, has given 
himself to the service of God, has rejoiced in 
the pardon of sin at the cross; now the next 
thing in order is the communion of saints, the 
union with others in the word of life. 

The path which passes the cross leads 
straight to the Church. There is no other 
way so sure and so safe. Faithful, a com- 
panion whom Christian found later on, did not 
stop here ; did not unite with the Church. But 
he always held a subordinate position. When- 
ever heroic deeds were to be done he waited for 
Christian to do them. And he died early, as if 
Bunyan was not willing to trust him long in a 

53 



54 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

Christian life which was not associated with 
the Church. 

Let us go with our good friend as he leaves 
the cross and journeys toward the Church. 
Other men have passed this way. Perhaps 
there is some one here who is in this stage of 
the journey — beyond the cross, but not in the 
Church ; saved, but not among the saved ; a dis- 
ciple of Jesus, but coming to him by night — 
using God, but of no public use to God ; a mem- 
ber of the church general, but uncounted among 
the sacramental hosts who have elected to rep- 
resent God on the earth. 

At the bottom of the hill on which stands 
the cross he finds three men asleep, Simple, 
Sloth, and Presumption. With the restlessness 
born of eager enthusiasm and an ever-present 
sense of danger, he wakens them and urges 
them forward. Simple replies to his urging, 
in substance, "Why should I go on? Why join 
the Church ? It is just as safe outside. I see no 
danger." 

There are some dangers which may not be 
seen. Many a good ship has gone down be- 
cause the pilot did not see the rock that 
crouched beneath the waves and waited to de- 
stroy. A long and dangerous illness came to 
me once from drinking a glass of water. It 
was clear and cold and refreshing. I could see 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



55 



no peril there ; but typhoid germs lurked in its 
crystal depths, and death sat there with them, 
and only by an awful struggle was his relent- 
less ambushed power broken. Bunyan wishes 
to teach that there is danger outside the 
Church and only simple souls are satisfied be- 
cause they do not see it. 

Sloth rubs his blinking eyes and growls, 
"Yet a little more sleep." He represents those 
who regard church membership as of too much 
trouble; church services too wearying; church 
obligations too exacting; who prefer a Sunday 
of idleness to a Sunday of worship; who are 
too indolent to make an effort, too selfish to 
make any sacrifice. 

The third man is Presumption, and he says, 
"Every tub must stand on its own bottom." 
He is the man who is just as good as the church 
member. For a man may think he is a great 
sinner and too bad to join the Church, or the 
pendulum may swing to the other extreme and 
he may think he is a great saint, and therefore 
too good. 

But, to return to our self-complacent slum- 
berer, there never yet was made a tub that 
could stand on its own bottom alone. There 
must be something for the bottom to stand on. 
The old pre-astronomic theory of elephant and 
tortoise and rocks as a good resting place for 



56 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

the earth is not good cosmography; it is not 
good theology. There must be something be- 
low the lowest. Foundations come first. 

There is no real independence. Never yet 
lived the man who could live unto himself. No 
traveler sets out alone and at random to cross 
the desert. He goes with the caravan and 
keeps to the ancient path. No steamship cap- 
tain ever attempts to navigate the Atlantic on 
his own responsibility. He must have a license 
from the proper authorities and he uses a certi- 
fied chart and compass. No sane tourist ever 
dares to scale the Alps alone. He must have 
his guide and in many instances must be tied 
by ropes to his guide. 

The last great truth taught by the eighteenth 
century was the independence of man. It came 
reeking with the smoke of a hundred battle- 
fields and red with the blood of nations. Its 
watchword was, "We hold these truths to be 
self-evident, that all men are created equal." It 
was but putting into political economy the 
axiom of the ancient book that God, that is, the 
Eternal Nature of things, is no 1 respecter of 
persons. While Thomas Jefferson was writing 
the Declaration of Independence, a paper which 
shaped the thinking of the political world, and 
in which this sentiment is formulated, Adam 
Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 57 

book which shaped the policy of the business 
world for a hundred years. The same ideas 
are here expressed, that what each man wants 
is liberty and equality. Only this and he can 
then take care of himself. 

But this is not enough. France had learned 
the lesson better because France had attended 
a fiercer school. On her public buildings and 
on her fountains and on her great seal she has 
stamped another word. "Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity" is the mystic triumvirate of the 
later dispensation, and not the least of these is 
Fraternity. And as the last great truth learned 
by the eighteenth century was the independence 
of man, so the last great truth learned by the 
nineteenth century was the interdependence of 
man. This immense revelation is as old as 
Saint Paul's letter to the Romans; for to the 
puissant rulers of the world empire this radical 
reformer wrote, "We that are strong ought to 
bear the infirmities of the weak." 

I am glad we have the Church. It means 
safety and it means power. I am of but little 
consequence myself, but if I can unite with nine 
hundred and ninety-nine others when I speak 
or when I vote, my voice or my vote will have 
in it the impact of a thousand men. The 
Church would have been swept from the earth 
centuries ago, humanly speaking, if it had not 



58 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

been organized. Martin Luther's Reformation 
would have been buried in the grave with him 
in the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg if there had 
not sprung up a party in the heart of Germany 
to perpetuate his teachings. John Wesley 
would be known, perhaps, as a dangerous her- 
etic branded and bridled by the English Estab- 
lishment had not a body of men banded them- 
selves together and given being to an inde- 
pendent Church. 

Three millions of slaves would have died 
with their fetters on, and their poor emaciated 
bodies would have been huddled into shallow 
holes in the corner of Southern cotton fields, or 
sunk in the slimy lagoons of Southern swamps, 
if the freedom-loving sentiments of Beecher 
and Phillips and Lincoln had not been solidified 
into a great political party and then hurled at 
the heart of the monster whose wings darkened 
one half our national domain. The fouler vam- 
pire of intemperance, prowling night and day 
along our streets and crouching on the thresh- 
old of every home, will never be strangled until 
men and women combine in some distinct polit- 
ical upheaval and take for their motto the his- 
toric war cry, "Live or die, sink or swim, sur- 
vive or perish, the saloon must go !" 

Get into the ranks, brother. It may not be 
true that God is always on the side of the larg- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 59 

est battalions, but the larger the battalion, the 
better the terms it can make with the enemy. 
Join the Church, for your coming will add that 
much weight to this great steam hammer that 
is grinding to powder the evil things, and the 
unjust things, and the degrading things with 
which the world is cursed. 

We have fallen upon evil times. The Presi- 
dent of the United States feels justified in 
charging great business corporations with 
actual and shameless robbery. The Beef Trust, 
according to accredited witnesses, has been 
poisoning the people by wholesale. The coal 
barons and the railroads that are in the deal 
have fixed the minimum price of coal for the 
next ten years; the maximum price will de- 
pend, we are told, upon what the public will 
stand. These are the things the people are 
talking about. If these charges are true, then 
there is need of a strong hand to correct such 
evils. If they are not true, then there is 
needed an imperative voice to quiet the tumult 
and to rebuke the slander. 

Moreover, nations do not live by bread alone 
any more than does a man. They live on 
ideals, on great incontrovertible truths, on lofty 
aspirations. It is an accepted principle of his- 
tory that no nation in which a single element 
has gained the mastery can long prosper. This 



6o 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



is the characteristic of the ancient civilizations. 
In the civilization of India, of Egypt, of Rome, 
one element overshadows all others — of reli- 
gion, of militarism, of monarchism, for in- 
stance. Contrast with these examples the cor- 
related forces of English life — the Church, the 
nobility, and the throne — or the active prin- 
ciples of the German Zeitgeist. In this latter 
the rigid military discipline, the philosophy of 
Kant and Schiller and Fichte, and even the 
more thoughtful phases of Socialism, all work- 
ing together, have produced a sure and steady 
growth that has given Germany an assured 
place among the world powers. 

Look now at the American life. Our fathers 
had much to do when they came to these shores. 
The gown of the scholar, the pen of the scribe, 
were laid aside for ax and saw. This was the 
pioneer spirit, but the days of pioneering are 
past. It was the stimulant, and there is always 
danger that the stimulant for the weak man 
will forge a habit for the strong man and the 
last case be worse than the first. The quick 
heart throbs of our young and lusty national 
life have produced fever; and there are not 
wanting symptoms that the fever is becoming 
chronic. One of the standing menaces to our 
future is the mercantile spirit, the crass mate- 
rialism born in the early days of our republic, 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



61 



the money-making Philistine that would blind 
the shorn Samsons of art and literature and 
religion and set them grinding at his mill. 

The Church which has a mission to the times 
is a Church for the times: not the rich man's 
Church nor yet the poor man's Church; but 
the serene, gentle-voiced mother of all where 
there is weakness or where there is error, and 
the impartial star-browed goddess of justice 
where there is wrong. 

AND he lifted up his eyes, and behold 
there was a very stately palace be- 
fore him, the name of which was 
Beautiful; and it stood just by the high- 
way side. 

So I saw in my dream that he made 
haste and went forward, that if possible 
he might get lodging there. Now, before 
he had gone far, he entered into a very 
narrow passage, which was about a fur- 
long off the porter's lodge; and, looking 
very narrowly before him as he went, he 
espied two lions in the way. Now, thought 
he, I see the dangers that Mistrust and Tim- 
orous were driven back by. (The lions 
were chained, but he saw not the chains.) 
Then he was afraid, and thought also him- 
self to go back after them, for he thought 
nothing but death was before him. But 
the porter at the lodge, whose name is 



62 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

Watchful, perceiving that Christian made 
a halt as if he would go back, cried unto 
him, saying, "Is thy strength so small? 
Fear not the lions, for they are chained, 
and are placed there for trial of faith where 
it is, and for discovery of those that had 
none. Keep in the midst of the path, and 
no hurt shall come unto thee." 

Then I saw that he went on, trembling 
for fear of the lions ; but taking good heed 
to the directions of the porter, he heard 
them roar, but they did him no harm. 
Then he clapped his hands, and went on 
till he came and stood before the gate 
where the porter was. Then said Chris- 
tian to the porter, "Sir, what house is this? 
And may I lodge here to-night?" The 
porter answered, "This house was built by 
the Lord of the hill, and he built it for the 
relief and security of pilgrims." 

There were in this house certain keen-witted 
damsels whose business it was to talk to stran- 
gers and to get at the facts in the case. For 
they had tramps even in those days. There is 
such a thing as entertaining an angel unawares 
who may not be a good angel. Ever since the 
days of the Wooden Horse and of Pandora 
people have been a little careful what and whom 
they admit within the gates to stay overnight. 
A moderate amount of heresy-hunting, espe- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



63 



daily before the heretic has been naturalized, 
is not bad politics. And so these ladies come to 
talk with Christian and to take his measure. 

The first was Discretion, grave and beautiful 
but shrewd. Whence did he come, whither was 
he going? What had he seen, and what was 
his name? The custom of asking a new con- 
vert to speak is an old custom apparently. And 
when he finished speaking the tears were in her 
eyes. Ah, the brain might be keen and search- 
ing, but the heart was tender. 

And tender and loving and sympathetic is 
the Church, even when it is asking questions 
and testing the fitness of a candidate. No 
amount of repented sin, no degree of ignorance, 
no poverty of purse, need keep a man out of 
the Church if he really wants to come in — if he 
come not to mend but to be mended ; not as a 
critic of creed or disseminator of perverse doc- 
trines; not as a poacher looking for game in 
well-kept preserves, nor a Captain Dalgetty 
expecting "a consideration"; but as a humble 
teachable sinner, saved and seeking to save. 
Our traveler was sinful and poor and ragged 
and ignorant, but, "Come in, thou blessed of 
the Lord," the good woman exclaims when she 
finds him in earnest ; and, bowing his head rev- 
erently and respectfully, he enters the door. 

Other conversations there were with other 



64 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

charming maidens, by which, in being reminded 
of the deliverance of the past, his faith was 
strengthened for the future; and by which he 
was caused to see that wherein once his whole 
motive had been to get the reward of righteous 
living, now his desire was to "see Him alive 
that did hang dead on the cross." All this I 
commend to your reading. 

We are concerned with his visit to the ar- 
mory and an examination of the weapons that 
in the hands of faithful men had changed the 
history of the world. 

THE next day they took him and had 
him into the armory, where they 
showed him all manner of furni- 
ture, which their Lord had provided for 
pilgrims, as sword, shield, helmet, breast- 
plate, all-prayer, and shoes that would not 
wear out. And there was here enough of 
this to harness out as many men for the 
service of their Lord as there be stars in 
the heaven for multitude. 

They also showed him some of the en- 
gines with which some of his servants 
had done wonderful things. They showed 
him Moses's rod; the hammer and nail 
with which Jael slew Sisera; the pitchers, 
trumpets, and lamp, too, with which 
Gideon put to flight the armies of Midian. 
Then they showed him also the ox's goad 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



65 



wherewith Shamgar slew six hundred men. 
They showed him also the jawbone with 
which Samson did such mighty feats. They 
showed him, moreover, the sling and stone 
with which David slew Goliath of Gath; 
and the sword, also, with which their Lord 
will kill the Man of Sin, in the day that he 
shall rise up to the prey. They showed 
him, besides, many excellent things, with 
which Christian was much delighted. This 
done, they went to their rest again. 

All this is the property of the Church. It 
was for the sake of the Church of God, just 
breaking away from Egypt, that the rod of 
Moses wrought wonders on the Nile, and 
brought an appalling darkness, and divided 
asunder the Red Sea for the safe passage of the 
chosen people. The pebble that smote the 
Giant of Gath in the forehead was sent to re- 
buke this blatant defiant enemy of the Church 
established at Shiloh and Gibeah and Ramah. 

The suggestion of the Book is that all this 
artillery is still kept in the Church. I do not 
mean to say that the broken pitchers and the 
lamps of Gideon are still preserved in some 
dark closet of our building. The dishes we 
keep in many of our church kitchens are often 
ancient and battered enough to be treasured 
as historic and musty relics, but they are dis- 



66 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



tinctly modern. What is meant is that the same 
divine power that wrought at midnight in the 
Valley of Jezreel when Midian fled before the 
shout, "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon," 
is still manifest in the operations of the Church. 
We may not have David's sling, but we have 
his songs, and many a giant of doubt and dis- 
may has gone down before them. The rod of 
Moses was not more potent than the rules of 
Moses, written on tables of stone, published to 
the world, and molding civilization. The "I 
am that I am" was not more certainly the God 
of Israel than he is the God of the modern reli- 
gious dispensation. Elijah and Isaiah and 
Ezra received orders from the same source and 
help from the same hand that directs and sus- 
tains our leaders to-day. 

It is a good thing to belong to the Church. 
It was a good thing to be an Israelite in the 
day that the hailstones fell upon all Egypt 
save the dwellings of the Hebrew slaves, and 
in the night that God's destroying angel passed 
through the land. But it is better to belong to 
"the general assembly and church of the first- 
born who are enrolled in heaven." Our High 
Priest hath obtained a more excellent ministry. 
He is the Mediator of "a better covenant, which 
was established upon better promises." 

We are working with God. We are part of 






WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



67 



God's plan. We are taking up the work where 
Jesus left it and carrying it forward under his 
orders. We are of those for whom he made 
his wonderful prayer as he stood in the shadow 
of the cross and said, "I pray not that thou 
shouldest take them out of the world, but that 
thou shouldest keep them from the evil." Will 
you not come into the House Beautiful ? 

It was here that Christian found his armor. 
Here they "harnessed him from head to foot 
with what was of proof, lest perhaps he should 
meet with assaults in the way." Here he re- 
ceived the sword of the Spirit, which is the 
Word of God. The Bible is the gift of the 
Church, as well as a gift to the Church. There 
would be no Bible if there had been no Church, 
as the Church made the Bible and then has pre- 
served it through the ages. Here he received 
the helmet of salvation. What would the 
world know of salvation if the Church had not 
preached it from its pulpits and illustrated it 
in its activities. Here was given the shield of 
faith, and how long would faith last in the 
world if the Church should die and all its 
operations cease? 

Christian is to need this armor soon. Just 
ahead lurks a formidable and relentless enemy. 
He will be lost without his sword and shield. 
And so will you. You will not be twenty-four 



68 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

hours older before you will be attacked. Are 
you ready? 

A well-known bishop once said that when he 
was a boy he started on a long journey. His 
mother was a quiet woman and said but little 
when deeply stirred, and so somehow he was 
not quite satisfied with the farewell. As he 
walked down the street the thought came that 
he might never see her again, and he went back 
to ask for her blessing. She was on her knees. 
He knelt by her side, and as he knelt there she 
laid her hands on his head and said, "God bless 
you, my boy, and bring you safe home when 
your work is done." Before he returned the 
mother passed away. In her death hour she 
asked for paper to write a letter to her boy. 
She tried to write a stanza of her favorite 
hymn, 

E'en down to old age all my people shall prove 
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love. 

She wrote only, "E'en down to old age." 
There the tired hand failed and the pen 
dropped, and the loving mother went home. 
"I have that letter yet," said the beautiful- 
souled bishop, "a tiny strip of faded yellow 
paper, and no money on earth could buy it." 

The Church is to us as a message from our 
mother and our father ; it is our heritage from 



• . . __- - - :.:taftrt.a,wrjffin;iuciji.ri n. : iP) 



uumi M < i M:* m Lmm* im 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



6 9 



the past. The God of the Church is the God of 
the family and the God of every human heart. 
Here is the House Beautiful. If you really 
want to please God and stand with his people 
here and rejoice with the loved ones redeemed, 
"Come in, thou blessed of my Father," and 
take a place among us in his name. 



NIGHT THE FIFTH 
THE FIRST BATTLE 



They only who reconquer day by day 
The inch of ground they camped on overnight 
Have right of foothold on this crowded earth. 
-~-Edith Wharton. "Vesalius in Zante. 



NIGHT THE FIFTH 
The First Battle 



mmmm 



/I ROM the House Beautiful the 
*tfP 1 path leads down into the Valley 
of Humiliation. It is a strange 
route to heaven, a strange se- 
quel to the rapt experiences of 
the past few days. But it is the highest breaker 
that has the strongest undertow; it is the day 
after the feast that the headache comes. A re- 
action will follow even religious excitement. 
We cannot keep holiday all the time. So down 
into the dusky valley he goes where the great 
enemy awaits ; and the battle of his life is on. 

BUT now in this Valley of Humiliation 
poor Christian was hard put to it; 
for he had gone but a little way 
before he espied a foul fiend coming over 
the field to meet him ; his name is Apollyon. 
Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and 
to cast in his mind whether to go back or 
to stand his ground. But he considered 
again that he had no armor for his back, 
and therefore thought that to turn the back 
to him might give him the greater advan- 

73 



> — ._— . 



74 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

tage with ease to pierce him with his darts. 
Therefore he resolved to venture and stand 
his ground; "for," thought he, "had I no 
more in mine eye than the saving of my 
life, it would be the best way to stand." 

So he went on, and Apollyon met him. 
Now, the monster was hideous to behold: 
he was clothed with scales, like a fish (and 
they are his pride), he had wings like a 
dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his belly 
came fire and smoke, and his mouth was 
as the mouth of a lion. When he was 
come up to Christian, he beheld him with 
a disdainful countenance, and thus began 
to question with him: — 

Let us note quickly that Christian has no 
armor for his back. What a shock this dis- 
covery must have given him ! Perhaps he had 
never thought of it before. Whether he wished 
it or not he must stand his ground ; retreat was 
disarmament, and disarmament was defeat. 

A good soldier needs no armor for his back. 
His enemies are all and always in front. 
Safety lies in going ahead. The danger that 
is behind will overtake us only if we stop ; the 
danger that is in front may not last long enough 
for us to reach it. Nine tenths of the troubles 
that make the hair prematurely gray never 
come. There are chained lions all along the 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



75 



way, and we see the lions long before we see 
the chains. The courage symbolized by the 
armor for the breast so often wins by showing 
us the emptiness of our fears. We not only 
break our idols but we conquer many of our 
enemies by going to see them. Distance some- 
times magnifies terror as well as lends enchant- 
ment. 

The things that threatened me 
Ne'er looked but on my back; when they shall see 
The face of Caesar, they are vanished. 



Moreover, there are no arrangements for 
defeat in God's plans. When he sends the 
millions of Israel out of Egypt he closes up the 
Red Sea behind them so that they cannot get 
back if they would. When he sends forth the 
disciples from Jerusalem to evangelize the 
world he tears up the very site of the old city 
with a Roman plow, and gives another name to 
the new city built on the ruins — a name it wears 
for a hundred years. Sherman cut himself 
loose from Atlanta and started for the sea, two 
hundred and fifty miles away. Hood was be- 
hind him with a formidable army, but he kept 
his eyes front and in less than thirty days he 
came in sight of the blue Atlantic. With fifty 
thousand men he had passed through the heart 
of the Confederacy. A defeat would have 



76 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

been ruin, as he had no base of supplies and no 
possible hope of reinforcements. But he did 
not intend to be defeated. 

There is no armor for the back in our Chris- 
tian warfare. There is no provision for a 
retrograde movement. We are to be "stead- 
fast, unmovable, always abounding in the work 
of the Lord, forasmuch as we know that our 
labor is not in vain in the Lord." 

Before the fiend attacks he argues. Before 
he puts on the pressure he tries the power of 
persuasion. The syllogism first, and then the 
sword. He is too astute to use violence unless 
it is unavoidable. He can manage the most of 
us without any friction and without showing 
his hand. If he had tried harsh measures with 
you, perhaps you would have resisted and repu- 
diated him. But he talks and you stop to 
listen. 

The first claim he makes is that Christian is 
his subject : 

A POL. Whence come you? and 
whither are you bound? 

Chr. I am come from the City of 
Destruction, which is the place of all evil, 
and am going to the City of Zion. 

Apol. By this I perceive thou art one of 
my subjects, for all that country is mine; 
and I am the prince and god of it. How is 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 77 

it, then, that thou hast run away from thy 
king? Were it not that I hope thou mayest 
do me more service, I would strike thee 
now at one blow to the ground. 

Chr. I was born indeed in your do- 
minions, but your service was hard, and 
your wages such as a man could not live 
on, "for the wages of sin is death"; there- 
fore, when I was come to years, I did as 
other considerate persons do, look out, if 
perhaps I might mend myself. 

Apol. There is no prince that will thus 
lightly lose his subjects, neither will I as 
yet lose thee. But since thou complainest 
of thy service and wages, be content to go 
back: what our country will afford I do 
here promise to give thee. 

He lets it all out here. I venture to say he 
had never made that claim before. Most prob- 
ably he had told Christian that he was all 
right — a great deal better than some who made 
a larger profession. Apollyon does not stamp 
his trademark where it may be seen, on all his 
goods. A man may belong to him for years 
without knowing it ; at any rate, without hav- 
ing that knowledge unpleasantly forced upon 
him. He is a most agreeable silent partner 
and never seems to interfere in the conduct of 
the business. But the truth will come after a 



78 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

while. Vice will show itself in the face in due 
time. Who cuts himself loose from the bal- 
loon in midair must strike somewhere. Dr. 
Jekyll is master of himself and master of Mr. 
Hyde for a season; then Mr. Hyde becomes 
master. The volcanic fires may burn down 
deep in the heart of the mountain for centuries, 
and the vines be green and the olive orchards 
be laden with fruit along the sunny slopes. 
But the water is slowly trickling down toward 
the subterranean furnace, and some awful day 
the earth will be shaken and the cities be swept 
into death. "In vain the net is spread in the 
sight of any bird." It is a very foolish bird 
that slips his head into a visible noose. Even 
if he is trapped he does not at once discover it. 
But the time comes when the deadly meshes 
will stand revealed. 

There is a quaint old story of the Middle 
Ages which tells how once upon a time a church 
member died at a ball. Along came Satan and 
was soon flying away with the bewildered soul. 
Saint Peter espied him and started in pursuit. 
"Hold on," said the watchful guardian of the 
gate; "just pass him over to me, if you please. 
He was a Christian. He is my property." 
"Maybe he was," growled Satan, "but you 
keep your hands off ; I found him on my prem- 
ises and down he goes." This story is five 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 79 

hundred years old, and is not, as you might sus- 
pect, a sly invention of Methodism. 

The next argument of Apollyon is that Chris- 
tian is not sure of himself : 

A POL. Thou hast already been un- 
faithful in thy service to him; and 
how dost thou think to receive 
wages of him? 

Chr. Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been 
unfaithful to him? 

Apol. Thou didst faint at first setting 
out, when thou wast almost choked in the 
Gulf of Despond ; thou didst attempt wrong 
ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas 
thou shouldest have stayed till thy Prince 
had taken it off; thou didst sinfully sleep 
and lose thy choice thing; thou wast also 
almost persuaded to go back at the sight 
of the lions ; and when thou talkest of thy 
journey, and of what thou hast heard and 
seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain 
glory in all that thou sayest or doest. 

Aha, how long since Apollyon turned friend 
to pilgrims ? This is the kindest thing he could 
do. Nothing better can happen to us than to 
be told our shortcomings occasionally. A man 
wants a good friend to tell him what he can do, 
and he wants pretty often a good enemy to tell 
him what he has done that ought to have been 



8o MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

left undone, and what he has left undone that 
he ought to have done. A healthy, honest, 
calculating, observing, unmuzzled, businesslike 
enemy is sometimes the best friend we can have. 
All hail to our enemies ! Long may they live and 
keep their rods in pickle ! If they tell the truth 
about us, send them a vote of thanks, and get 
the most out of it. If they tell what is not the 
truth, then remember they are only saying what 
they would like us to do, and hinting at the way 
they would make it hot for us if we should do 
it; and always bear this in mind, that a wise 
man may make a mistake once, but it is the fool 
who makes the same mistake a second time. 

Apollyon's third argument is a reflection 
upon God : 

"•"CONSIDER what thou art like to meet 
\^ with in the way that thou goest. 
Thou knowest that, for the most 
part, God's servants come to an ill end, be- 
cause they are trangressors against me and 
my ways. How many of them have been 
put to shameful deaths ! And, besides, thou 
countest his service better than mine; 
whereas, he never came yet from the place 
where he is, to deliver any that served 
him out of their hands : but, as for me, how 
many times, as all the world very well 
knows, have I delivered, either by power 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 81 

or fraud, those that have faithfully served 
me, from him and his, though taken by 
them ! And so I will deliver thee." 



God's servants come to an evil end ; God does 
not seem to trouble himself about human af- 
fairs ; God's world seems to be a bad place for 
Christians. This is the time-worn tale. This 
is the voice out of the ages ; the specter of evil 
that stalks across the plains of human thought ; 
the nightmare that sat in the ash-heaps with 
Job and made him curse with cracked and 
festering lips the day on which he was born; 
the ghastly, querulous pessimism that whis- 
pered treason even in the heart of the buoyant 
shepherd psalmist, and snarled, "Who will 
show us any good ?" 

When shall we ever understand the mystery 
of suffering and hard luck? When shall we 
ever realize that God does not promise his chil- 
dren sugarplums, or railroad stock, or good 
digestion? To be sure, the Bible promises de- 
liverance from the fowler's snare and from the 
noisome pestilence. "Thou shalt not be afraid 
for the terror by night ; nor for the arrow that 
flieth by day ; nor for the pestilence that walk- 
eth in darkness; nor for the destruction that 
wasteth at noonday. It shall not come nigh 
thee." But the Bible moves on spiritual levels, 



82 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

and it handles the material objects and facts as 
symbols only. If the psalmist meant in the lit- 
eral, natural sense that no plague should come 
nigh the dwelling of the righteous, then he had 
forgotten his own experience ; or he had filed an 
exception in his own case ; or he was ready to 
confess that he was not righteous. 

The spiritual nature can never be success- 
fully invaded from without. The kingdom of 
heaven within us can only be shaken by inward 
foes. This is the meaning of it all. Grisly 
plague and haggard pestilence can never climb 
to the seat of the soul. In its far ranges, cloud- 
belted and aloof, the human spirit sits serene. 

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles 
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. 

Paul knelt blindfolded upon the grass that 
skirted the Ostian Road, and the keen sword 
of the executioner smote his faithful head from 
his shoulders. But if you could have inter- 
preted the spirit of that weapon as it whistled 
on its dread mission you might have heard it 
say, "It is all right, Paul. I am here to take 
your poor life only. I cannot come nigh your 
soul." John Huss, the martyr teacher and 
preacher of Bohemia, stood in the midst of the 
flame singing praises to God, and the fire whis- 
pered as it crept upward about his suffering 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 83 

body, "Receive me, thou glorious servant of 
God. I am thy best friend. I shall do thee no 
harm, but am sent, like Elijah's chariot of old, 
to bear thee into the eternities." 

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
unto you," said Jesus to his terror-stricken dis- 
ciples, cowering in the shadow of an unknown 
and imminent evil. Peace, did he say? — this 
man who had not where to lay his head ; who 
was hounded by plotting enemies; who knew 
when he uttered these words that in less than 
twenty-four hours spikes of iron would be 
driven through his hands and a howling mob 
would be watching his death throes. Ah, the 
dwelling-place of his kingly serenity was too 
deep down to be reached by the cruel nails, or 
disturbed by the fierce cries of his foes. 

This may be your refuge in the day of shak- 
ing and of great distress. Five hundred feet 
down beneath the ocean waves there are no 
waves. The great waters abide in an unbroken 
and an eternal calm. The scream of the storm- 
bird, the hiss of the vengeful winds through the 
broken rigging, the crunch and grind of rend- 
ing timbers, the growl of sullen, ruthless break- 
ers — all this is unheard and unknown in the 
depths. 

Rudyard Kipling, in the remarkably pene- 
trative way that has made him famous, sings : 



84 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down 

from afar — 
Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white 

sea-snakes are. 

There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts 
of the deep, 

On the great gray level plains of ooze, where the shell- 
burred cables creep. 

Here in the womb of the world — here on the tie-ribs 

of earth, 
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and 

beat- 
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth — 
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice 

nor feet. 



"In the day of trouble he shall keep me se- 
cretly in his pavilion : in the covert of his tab- 
ernacle shall he hide me." 

Dwell deep ! Penetrate even to the secret of 
his presence ; hide even in the inner room of his 
tent, and then shall no changes of season or 
place make any change in your mind. Dwell 
deep! God promises to keep that which you 
have committed unto him, the interests of your 
soul ; and if that be safe it matters little what 
else may go. Dwell deep ! for better than the 
dawn-lighted heathen Cato may we realize the 
force of the words that have been put into his 
mouth by Addison, and addressed to his soul : 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself 
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years ; 
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, 
Unhurt amidst the war of elements, 
The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds. 



85 



THEN Apollyon broke out into a 
grievous rage, saying, "I am an 
enemy to this Prince; I hate his 
person, his laws, and people; I am come 
out on purpose to withstand thee." 

Chr. Apollyon, beware what you do; 
for I am in the King's highway, the way of 
holiness; therefore take heed to yourself. 

Then Apollyon straddled quite over the 
whole breadth of the way, and said, "I am 
void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself 
to die ; for I swear by my infernal den, that 
thou shalt go no further; here will I spill 
thy soul." 

And with that he threw a flaming dart 
at his breast; but Christian had a shield 
in his hand, with which he caught it, and 
so prevented the danger of that. 

Then did Christian draw, for he saw it 
was time to bestir him; and Apollyon as 
fast made at him, throwing darts as thick 
as hail; by the which, notwithstanding 
all that Christian could do to avoid it, 
Apollyon wounded him in his head, his 
hand, and his foot. This made Christian 
give a little back; Apollyon therefore fol- 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

lowed his work amain, and Christian again 
took courage, and resisted as manfully as 
he could. This sore combat lasted for 
above half a day, even till Christian was 
almost quite spent; for you must know 
that Christian, by reason of his wounds, 
must needs grow weaker and weaker. 

Then Apollyon, espying his opportunity, 
began to gather up close to Christian, and, 
wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful 
fall; and with that Christian's sword flew 
out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, "I 
am sure of thee now." And with that he 
had almost pressed him to death, so that 
Christian began to despair of life; but, as 
God would have it, while Apollyon was 
fetching of his last blow, thereby to make 
a full end of this good man, Christian 
nimbly stretched out his hand for his 
sword, and caught it, saying, "Rejoice not 
against me, O mine enemy: when I fall I 
shall rise," and with that gave him a deadly 
thrust, which made him give back, as one 
that had received his mortal wound. 
Christian, perceiving that, made at him 
again, saying, "Nay, in all these things we 
are more than conquerors through him 
that loved us." And with that Apollyon 
spread forth his dragon's wings, and sped 
him away, that Christian for a season saw 
him no more. 



NIGHT THE SIXTH 

VANITY FAIR — FIGHTING ON LOW 
LEVELS 



Quantus est in rebus inane. — Persius. 



NIGHT THE SIXTH 




Vanity Fair — Fighting on Low Levels 

HERE are two of them now. 
After passing the dark valley of 
trial Christian climbed a hill that 
had been thrown up so that pil- 
grims might see about them. 
From the summit he saw another traveler in 
the way, whose name was Faithful. 

Christianity is not all valley, and no man is 
lonesome when on the hilltop. Elijah was as 
brave as a lion and as blithe as the springtime 
when on Mount Carmel busy with the affairs 
of God and in sharp collision with Baal. He 
did not trouble himself about his apparent isola- 
tion. He rather gloried in it. "I only re- 
main a prophet of the Lord ; but Baal's proph- 
ets are four hundred and fifty." Sublime in 
his splendid courage, he asked no special terms, 
no time allowance. It was one and God 
against the world. A day's retreat into the 
desert, the shade of the juniper tree, and a little 
neglect of duty, and he sat down and wished 
he might die. 

If you have the blues, if things seem going 



go MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

to the bad, if the church seems to be a failure 
and the world waxing evil, get up on a spiritual 
hilltop somewhere. Go to prayer meeting and 
start a lively hymn. Say a hearty "Amen" to 
the prayer somebody is making, or the testi- 
mony somebody is giving. Never mind the 
temporary consternation that may follow such 
innovation. It does no harm sometimes to 
shock a prayer meeting out of its prim and 
Ciceronian order. Smash precedent somehow. 
Get out of the ruts if you must break a wheel. 
Get on a high place if you must leave the road. 
And then in the sudden spiritual perturbation, 
as the service seeks to find new adjustments 
and to reach new levels, your eyes will be 
opened and you will see all about you scores 
of faithful souls going the same way you are 
going, and filled with the presence of God. 

And so together they reach the town of 
Vanity and enter Vanity Fair. 

NOW, as Christian went on his way, 
he came to a little ascent, which 
was cast up on purpose that pil- 
grims might see before them. Up there, 
therefore, Christian went, and, looking 
forward, he saw Faithful before him, upon 
his journey. Then said Christian aloud, 
"Ho, ho, so-ho! stay, and I will be your 
companion!" At that, Faithful looked be- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 91 

hind; to whom Christian cried again, 
"Stay, stay, till I come up to you." But 
Faithful answered, "No, I am upon my 
life, and the avenger of blood is behind 
me." At this, Christian was somewhat 
moved, and putting to all his strength, he 
quickly got up with Faithful. 

Then I saw in my dream they went very 
lovingly on together, and had sweet dis- 
course of all things that had happened to 
them in their pilgrimage. 

Then I saw in my dream that, when they 
were got out of the wilderness, they pres- 
ently saw a town before them, and the 
name of that town is Vanity; and at the 
town there is a fair kept, called Vanity 
Fair. It is kept all the year long; it bear- 
eth the name of Vanity Fair because the 
town where it is kept is lighter than van- 
ity, and also because all that is there sold, 
or that cometh thither, is vanity. As is the 
saying of the wise, "All that cometh is 
vanity." 

This fair is no new-erected business, but 
a thing of ancient standings I will show 
you the original of it. 

Almost five thousand years agone, there 
were pilgrims walking to the Celestial 
City, as these two honest persons are ; and 
Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with 
their companions, perceiving by the path 



92 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

that the pilgrims made that their way to 
the city lay through this town of Vanity, 
they contrived here to set up a fair, a fair 
wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, 
and that it should last all the year long. 
Therefore at this fair are all such merchan- 
dise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, 
honors, preferments, titles, countries, king- 
doms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of 
all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, 
masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, 
souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, 
and what not. And, moreover, at this fair 
there is at all times to be seen juggling, 
cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, 
and rogues, and that of every kind. 

This is, as we are told, no new institution. It 
means in a certain sense the world we live in, 
with its pleasures and profits and prides ; and it 
has been here a long time. It was in evidence 
in the days of the young Moses. Pharaoh said 
to him, "Here are ease and comfort and power ; 
palaces of marble and feasts of measureless 
splendor ; princely robes, servants that study to 
please, and soldiers that hasten to obey. It is 
all yours if you will stay." And God said, 
"Yonder is the desert, hot and dry and cheer- 
less, a sandy waste. Yonder is a thankless, 
critical, ignorant people; an awful responsi- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



93 



bility. Which shall it be?" And Moses chose 
the desert and suspicion and responsibility and 
God. 

It was here in the days of Paul. He was a 
rising young lawyer, petted, trusted, honored, 
with splendid prospects. Yet he chose perils 
of water, perils of robbers, perils of his own 
countrymen, perils in the wilderness, watch- 
ings, fastings, and cold ; and in the midst of it 
all he was ready to say, "None of these things 
move me, neither count I my life dear unto my- 
self, so that I might finish my course with joy, 
and the ministry, which I have received of the 
Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace 
of God." It is the same old condition of which 
Hafiz, the fourteenth-century poet of Persia, 
wrote : 

The world is a bride in splendid array ; 
Who weds her, as dowry his soul must pay. 



But what do we mean by "the world" ? The 
word is on our lips a thousand times. It is one 
of the stock phrases of the preacher and re- 
vivalist — a sort of fee-faw-fum by which youth- 
ful and adventurous spirits are warned away 
from unexplored domains and uncanonized de- 
lights ; a working partner of a most disreputable 
firm, the other members of which are the flesh 
and the devil. 



94 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

Perhaps our ideas are a little confused. Per- 
haps the world to which we are not to be con- 
formed, the world which "lieth in the evil one," 
is not exactly the world of M creator's projec- 
tion or of Ridpath's history. Most certainly 
the word in its objectionable and objurgatory 
sense does not mean riches. Rich men are not 
all, and not always, worldly men. Nicodemus 
was immensely wealthy, yet he humbly took 
down the body of Jesus from the cross and lov- 
ingly buried it in the sepulcher of another rich 
man, who also was a believer. Lady Hunting- 
don was a scion of one of the oldest families in 
England, was mistress of splendid estates, and 
she was at the same time a devout servant of 
God. 

A few years ago the possessor of millions, 
a very master of finance, came to his death. In 
his last moments he asked his friends to sing, 
and there, amid the laces and drapery and 
costly furnishings of that magnificent death 
chamber, they sang by his own request : 

Come, ye sinners, poor and needy, 
Weak and wounded, sick and sore ; 

Jesus ready stands to save you, 
Full of pity, love, and power. 

The world, as condemned in the gospel, does 
not mean, therefore, the wealth of the world. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 95 

The love of money may be the root of all evil, 
but the right use of money is the means of 
much good. Jesus required but one man to 
sell all that he had and give to the poor, and 
probably would not have required it of him if 
he had been willing to make the surrender. 

The world does not mean public affairs, the 
cares of state, the activities of politics. Joseph 
and Daniel were famous officials intimately 
concerned in public life ; Dante and Savonarola 
were insistent, irrepressible politicians; Glad- 
stone and McKinley helped to shape the policy 
of powerful nations; yet all these were godly 
and devout men. The Christian may be a poli- 
tician, however difficult it may be for the poli- 
tician to be a Christian. The creed which 
claims that there is no room for the moral law 
in politics is the creed of the spoilsman, but all 
public men are not spoilsmen. Jack Sheppard 
sometimes turns political economist, even goes 
to Congress; then we may expect the rule of 
the highway to be introduced into our legisla- 
tive halls. 

The world does not mean the pleasures of 
life. To come out from the world does not 
mean that we are to live a narrow, ironclad, 
morbid existence, denying ourselves the luxury 
of a smile or the privilege of a pleasure party. 
Henry Martyn was one of the noblest of the 



96 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



men who have given themselves in sacrifice to 
the cause of missions. As he passed out of 
sight of Europe on his way to India he said, 
"Farewell, perishing world ! To me to live is 
Christ." Yet he claimed that music and paint- 
ing and poetry never had such charms as when 
he had entered into communion with God. The 
saintly Richard Cecil used to sit in the pulpit 
and look through the hymn book for the Scrip- 
ture lesson, and aimlessly turn the pages of the 
Bible looking for the hymn, when the organist 
was playing certain favorite selections, so en- 
tranced was he with the music. One of the 
best men I ever knew said that he could get 
shouting happy over a good brass band. 

The joy of heaven does not drive out the joys 
of earth. The best religion in town may come 
and live with a man who has great muscles and 
a mighty laugh, and who has good reason to 
feel three times a day like a giant refreshed, as 
three times a day he takes a giant's refresh- 
ment. 

To be sure, there is a brand of worldliness 
that may become sinful by causing the other 
man to sin through excess of disgust; that 
may awaken such contempt as to cultivate in 
our hearts the unhealthy pharisaism which 
thanks God that we are not as other men — 
and women. Perhaps, however, God will 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 97 

deal leniently with such extremely natural 
Pharisaism. 

At a social function in Washington one of 
the leaders in fashion carried a short cane. In 
forty-eight hours short canes were going at 
panic prices in the nation's capital, and every 
woman who made any pretension to social 
prominence was carrying one. A pink shirt 
worn at a fashionable reception by an English 
exquisite set all Pittsburg agog, and pink shirts 
blossomed out in every direction at the next 
gathering of the elect like a peach orchard in 
April. 

The company of rich Americans who dined 
on a gondola in the courtyard of the Savoy 
Hotel, London, water tinted blue having been 
turned into the courtyard of the hotel, the hotel 
staff being guised in appropriate fancy cos- 
tumes — this party of guests, we are told, was 
not a kindergarten out on a picnic, but a com- 
pany of grave, grown-up men and women. 
Americans have not a monopoly of cap and 
bells, however, since a party of South African 
millionaires sat down to a shirt and belt dinner 
under a tent in a London hotel dining room. 
The Newport woman who gave a dinner party 
to her pet monkey was not necessarily a sinner 
above all that dwelt in this city by the sea. She 
was only a little more of a clown than the rest. 



98 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

The Duchess of Cleveland had a baboon for 
a page. In the home of Baroness Dudley tea 
was served by a baboon dressed in gold bro- 
cade. The Countess of Dorchester was attended 
when driving out by three African monkeys 
in full livery. But, "Cui bono ?" If the taste 
of these dear ladies runs in this direction who 
will say them nay ? It may be but a slight re- 
version to type, a harking back to beginnings, a 
scratching of the aristocracy which reveals the 
simian ancestry, a new and picturesque ex- 
ample of atavism. 

These are phases of worldliness, but not nec- 
essarily examples of wickedness. Such things 
reveal a pathetic lack of head, but not always 
an obliquity of heart. It merely makes us 
wonder what fashionable mummery Puck had 
been attending when he cried out, "What fools 
these mortals be !" 

But what, then, does "the world" mean ? It 
means whatever draws the heart away from 
Christ; whatever makes you less a Christian; 
whatever takes the time which ought to be 
given to God ; whatever lowers the tone of the 
religious life or deadens the spiritual instinct. 
That is "the world" in the Bible sense. That 
is Vanity Fair, and its gauds are about us and 
the sound of its sackbut and psaltery mingles 
with our prayers. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 99 

THIS fair, therefore, is an ancient 
thing, of long standing, and a very 
great fair. 

Now, these pilgrims, as I said, must 
needs go through this fair. Well, so they 
did: but, behold! even as they entered 
into the fair, all the people in the fair were 
moved, and the town itself, as it were, in 
a hubbub about them ; and that for several 
reasons: for — 

First, the pilgrims were clothed with 
such kind of raiment as was diverse from 
the raiment of any that traded in that fair. 
The people, therefore, of the fair made a 
great gazing upon them: some said they 
were fools, some they were bedlams, and 
some they were outlandish men. 

Our friends, you will note, attracted atten- 
tion by their garments. I have not much to 
say on this subject. No Church has a right to 
decide what manner of clothing a man or a 
woman shall wear. A few general rules 
against sinful extravagance and silly ostenta- 
tion — this is all that can be done. Even Peter 
dealt very cautiously with this subject, suggest- 
ing that the adorning of women be not of gold 
or of putting on of apparel, but in a meek and 
quiet spirit. Peter, we know, had a wife and 
family, and his noncommittal attitude was born 



ioo MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

of experience. A Church cannot afford to go 
into the millinery business, either for its 
priests or its people. We are to take no 
thought, saying, "Wherewithal shall we be 
clothed ?" 

The world is growing wiser in the matter of 
clothes; a very distinct revolution is at work, 
and life is simpler and the tailor is losing caste. 
According to Carlyle, "The first purpose of 
clothes was not warmth or decency, but orna- 
ment. Miserable indeed was the condition of 
the aboriginal savage, glaring fiercely from un- 
der his fleece of hair, which, with the beard, 
reached down to the loins and hung around him 
like a matted cloak. Warmth he found in the 
chase, or amid dried leaves in his hollow tree, 
in his bark shed, or natural grotto, but for 
decoration he must make clothes. Nay, among 
wild people we find tattooing and painting even 
prior to clothes." 

Hear again the grim dyspeptic old philos- 
opher : "A dandy is a man whose trade, office, 
and existence consist in wearing clothes. 
Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and per- 
son is heroically consecrated to this one object 
— the wearing of clothes wisely and well." 

The race of dandies is dying out. The era 
of clothes as ornament is past. The Church 
may spare its f ulminations ; other forces are at 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 101 

work. The slashed doublet and Elizabethan 
ruff and shoe tip fastened to the belt are gone. 
They take up too much room in the office and 
in the trolley car. Men, and in many cases 
women nowadays, dress for comfort and not 
for show. Even the army is being revolution- 
ized ; the pomp and pageantry of war becomes 
very tame in olive drab. The famous Cold- 
stream Guards and the Black Watch, that had 
been wont to dazzle the eyes with their gor- 
geousness, marched to the relief of Kimberley 
in khaki. The Darghai Gordons took even the 
red feathers out of their caps, and painted the 
barrels of their Lee-Metfords and their coat 
buttons a dirty gray. 

How are the mighty fallen, and to what un- 
speakable depths of achromatism has sunk the 
thin red firing line! The field of glory is a 
hopeless monochrome. 

If I were to give you a rule for your ward- 
robe — which, however, I do not intend to do, 
as I know how useless it would be — it would be 
exactly the reverse of the rules suggested by 
the text. For the first time we have found 
Bunyan out of date. The Christian should at- 
tract no attention ; he should not be noticeable 
either in aping a foolish fashion or in striving 
to violate all fashion. Even the Quakers are 
making terms with the dress customs of the 



102 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

day. George Fox traveled the land in leather 
breeches, and took off his hat to neither king 
nor peasant. For two centuries the sartorial 
creed of his followers was : 

Dress not to please, nor imitate the nice, 
Be like good Friends and follow their advice. 
The rich man gayly clothed is now in hell, 
And dogges did eat attired Jezebel. 

But in these later times the dress of this sect 
is no longer ordained to be an outward sign of 
an inward grace. They are beginning to dress 
like people. Even the white book muslin ker- 
chief of the Shaker woman is disappearing be- 
fore silk and colors, and the hair of the men is 
losing its bangs. Some one asked Dr. Johnson 
what he thought of the dress of a certain lady. 
"She was dressed in exquisite taste," he an- 
swered. "I know that because I do not re- 
member a single tint nor pattern of her 
garments." 

SECONDLY, and as they wondered 
at their apparel, so they did like- 
wise at their speech; for few could 
understand what they said : they naturally 
spoke the language of Canaan, but they 
that kept the fair were the men of this 
world; so that, from one end of the fair 
to the other, they seemed barbarians each 
to the other. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 103 

They attracted attention by their speech. 
Why, to be sure. You may know a Christian 
by what he says. His language is the language 
of Canaan. A letter lies before me from a 
friend in which the writer, after traveling 
through Europe with its polyglot confusion, is 
felicitating himself upon reaching England and 
breathing "the atmosphere of our native 
tongue." The idea is so vivid that it is 
worth the sacrifice of rhetorical figure. The 
language of Canaan makes its own atmosphere. 
He who speaks it always has something to say, 
and what he says has hope and faith and the 
spirit of prayer in it. He does not sit dumb, 
recreant, languid, soulless, when the honor of 
Christ is at stake, or the saving power of the 
cross is in question. 

The Christian is also known by what he does 
not say. He does not say unclean things. 
Foul and filthy lips are the outward signs of a 
foul and filthy heart. They are the yellow flag 
of quarantine that indicates a loathsome, per- 
haps a contagious, disease within. The Chris- 
tian does not say bitter things. He does not 
slander and backbite. He does not "fawn on 
men, and hug them hard, and after scandal 
them." Ah, the miserable men and women 
who profess to be Christians, yet whose souls 
are cesspools of reeking slush; whose breath 



104 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

is malaria; who are ready to defile the good 
name and character of others with their own 
internal rottenness. May the great Father for- 
give them, for so often they know not what 
they do. 

The pilgrims attracted attention by their at- 
titude toward the wares on sale. 

THIRDLY, but that which did not 
a little amuse the merchandisers 
was, that these pilgrims set very 
light by all their wares. They cared not 
so much as to look upon them ; and if they 
called upon them to buy, they would put 
their fingers to their ears, and cry, "Turn 
away mine eyes from beholding vanity." 

Vanity Fair would soon go out of business if 
all were like these two travelers. Demand cre- 
ates supply. Markets are made by the buyer 
as well as by the seller. Necessity is the 
mother of Commerce, and is the architect 
whose plans have revolutionized the modern 
city. Study the sky line of New York city 
and you can see her finger marks. As the city 
grew in population space was found to be at a 
premium. Business had crowded down to the 
water on three sides. Room must be had, and 
there was no room in any direction except up- 
ward. Then came the towering buildings that 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 105 

outclimb the steeples and permit the landholder, 
who is supposed to own straight up to the stars, 
to utilize some of his aerial holdings. 

As long as there are women who are willing 
to pay ten cents car fare and climb over each 
other at the counter to buy fifty cents' worth 
of goods for forty-nine cents, there will be 
"bargain days." And on these days men must 
swing by the car straps — and moralize. As 
long as there are Sunday readers there will be 
Sunday newspapers. It is not the publisher, 
but the public, that is responsible for this arch 
Sabbath-breaker of our modern life. The 
Daily Mail of London started a Sunday edition 
some time ago. The Daily Telegraph followed 
suit, and religious London woke up and said 
things and did things. A healthy boycott is 
sometimes one of the noblest works of man. In 
a very short time the first-named paper said 
editorially, "The Sunday Mail is dead, and we 
bury it without regret." The Sunday edition 
was stopped in order to save the week-day edi- 
tion. In six days the Telegraph also sur- 
rendered. Public opinion which condemned, 
and Christian men and women who refused to 
buy the offending papers, had won the victory. 

The present supply of time-serving, bribe- 
taking politicians would go back to their plows 
and back offices and saloons if Christian men 



io6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

would do their duty. Whenever an evil exists 
and threatens damage and ruin, stealing our 
money, curtailing our rights, destroying souls, 
it is here because we as a people are willing that 
it should stay. For whenever the Christian 
people of America say all together that a thing 
must be or must not be, there is not power 
enough on the continent to alter the verdict. 
We have what we want. We need have only 
what we want. Whatever we have is here 
because we accept it with so much tranquility 
that our indifference is a virtual demand. 

And as a result of all this antithesis on the 
part of the two strangers, this clash with con- 
vention, this hostility to the vox populi, Faith- 
ful is brought to trial, found guilty of dissen- 
sion, and executed. These antagonisms are 
always present. The carnal mind is enmity 
against God, and the mercurial multitude has 
always had a cross and a stake for dissenters. 
Cyprian refused to sacrifice to the gods of the 
people, Savonarola the popular idol crossed the 
popular will, our Dreamer himself disdained 
to "beguile the time," and Vanity Fair ap- 
pointed its partial courts and executed its pre- 
determinate sentence. The dispute may not be 
so sharp, the issue may not be so absolute, the 
sequel may not be so tragic, but the spirit of 
the world is not the spirit of Christ, and who 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 107 

goes with one hand in hand must be divorced 
from the other. 

THEY therefore brought Faithful out, 
to do with him according to their 
law; and first they scourged him, 
then they buffeted him, then they lanced 
his flesh with knives ; after that they stoned 
him with stones, then pricked him with 
their swords; and, last of all, they burned 
him to ashes at the stake. Thus came 
Faithful to his end. 

Now, I saw that there stood behind the 
multitude a chariot and a couple of horses, 
waiting for Faithful, who (so soon as his 
adversaries had dispatched him) was taken 
up into it, and straightway was carried up 
through the clouds, with sound of trumpet, 
the nearest way to the Celestial Gate. 

But as for Christian, he had some re- 
spite, and was remanded back to prison. 
So he there remained for a space; but He 
that overrules all things, having the power 
of their rage in his own hand, so wrought 
it about that Christian for that time 
escaped them, and went his way. 

Now, I saw in my dream that Christian 
went not forth alone; for there was one 
whose name was Hopeful (being made so 
by the beholding of Christian and Faith- 
ful in their words and behavior, in their 



108 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

sufferings at the fair), who joined himself 
unto him, and, entering into a brotherly 
covenant, told him that he would be his 
companion. Thus, one died to bear testi- 
mony to the truth, and another rises out 
of his ashes to be a companion with Chris- 
tian in his pilgrimage. 



NIGHT THE SEVENTH 

DOUBTING CASTLE -FIGHTING ON 
HIGH LEVELS 



There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds. 

He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the specters of the mind 

And laid them ; thus he came at length 

To find a stronger faith his own, 
And Power was with him in the night 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 

And dwells not in the light alone. 

— Tennyson. 




NIGHT THE SEVENTH 

Doubting Castle — Fighting on High 
Levels 

| HERE are two important consid- 
erations for this evening: first, 
how Christian got into Doubting 
Castle ; and, second, how he got 
out. If these can be settled we 
will have spent the hour to some good purpose. 
For, learning how this man fell into the trap 
may be to us a caution, and learning how he 
escaped may prove a guide. 

There are two travelers again. When 
Faithful died at Vanity Fair his splendid hero- 
ism so wrought upon a citizen of that town 
named Hopeful that he joined his fortunes with 
Christian. 

NOW, I beheld in my dream that they 
had not journeyed far, but the river 
and the way for a time parted; 
at which they were not a little sorry, 
yet they durst not go out of the way. Now 
the way from the river was rough, and 
their feet tender, by reason of their travels ; 
"so the souls of the pilgrims were much 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

discouraged because of the way." Where- 
fore, still as they went on they wished for 
a better way. Now, a little before them, 
there was on the left hand of the road a 
meadow, and a stile to go over into it; and 
that meadow is called By-path Meadow. 
Then said Christian to his fellow, "If this 
meadow lieth along our wayside, let's go 
over into it." Then he went to the stile to 
see, and behold, a path lay along by the 
way on the other side of the fence. "It 
is according to my wish," said Christian. 
"Here is the easiest going; come, good 
Hopeful, and let us go over." 

Hope. But how if this path should lead 
us out of the way? 

"That's not like," said the other. "Look, 
doth it not go along by the way side?" 

So Hopeful, being persuaded by his fel- 
low, went after him over the stile. When 
they were gone over, and were got into the 
path, they found it very easy for their feet ; 
and withal they, looking before them, es- 
pied a man walking as they did (and his 
name was Vain-confidence) ; so they called 
after him, and asked him whither that way 
led. He said, "To the Celestial Gate." 
"Look," said Christian, "did not I tell you 
so? By this you may see we are right." 
So they followed, and he went before them. 
But, behold, the night came on, and it grew 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 113 

very dark; so that they that were behind 
lost the sight of him that went before. 

And now it began to rain, and thunder, 
and lighten in a very dreadful manner, and 
the water rose amain. They adventured to 
go back, but it was so dark, and the flood 
was so high, that in their going back they 
had like to have been drowned nine or ten 
times. Neither could they, with all the 
skill they had, get again to the stile that 
night. Wherefore, at last, lighting under 
a little shelter, they sat down there until 
the day brake; but, being weary, they fell 
asleep. 

Now, there was, not far from the place 
where they lay, a castle, called Doubting 
Castle, the owner whereof was Giant De- 
spair; and it was in his grounds they now 
were sleeping. Wherefore he, getting up 
in the morning early, and walking up and 
down in his fields, caught Christian and 
Hopeful asleep in his grounds. Then, with 
a grim and surly voice, he bid them awake, 
and asked them whence they were, and 
what they did on his grounds. They told 
him they were pilgrims, and that they had 
lost their way. Then said the giant, "You 
have this night trespassed on me, by 
trampling in and lying on my grounds, and 
therefore you must go along with me." So 
they were forced to go, because he was 



H4 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

stronger than they. They also had but lit- 
tle to say, for they knew themselves in a 
fault. The giant, therefore, drove them be- 
fore him, and put them into his castle, into 
a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking 
to the spirits of these two men. Here, 
then, they lay from Wednesday morning 
till Saturday night, without one bit of 
bread, or drop of drink, or light, or any to 
ask how they did. They were, therefore, 
here in evil case, and were far from friends 
and acquaintance. Now, in this place 
Christian had double sorrow, because it 
was through his unadvised counsel that 
they were brought into this distress. 

First, then, they got into Doubting Castle 
while looking for an easy way. For some 
miles they had walked by the side of a river, 
amid lily-decked meadows and under the shade 
of fruit-laden trees. Suddenly the road turned 
out of the happy valley and their feet were 
bruised by the rocks. How easily we are 
spoiled ! How ready we are to take life's good 
as our natural right, and to resent any change 
for the worse ! God's beneficent providence, in- 
stead of making us humbly grateful, so often 
makes us exacting, and we are ready to fret if 
the pleasant way does not last. 

Yet Christian had been warned of difficul- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 115 

ties. He had been told that he would not be 
carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease. 
God had been honest with him, as he has been 
honest with all of us, and he had taken the road 
for better or worse. It is Sunday-school-book 
theology which teaches that there is good and 
only good for the good, and bad and only bad 
for the bad. It is only in religious tracts of 
the limp and lackadaisical sort that the consid- 
erate employer never has a strike, and is sent 
for to bring the calumet of peace to other fac- 
tories ; or the conscientious workman saves the 
works from destruction and afterward marries 
his employer's daughter. Even a church may 
be struck by lightning; even the Bible in the 
soldier's breast-pocket does not always stop the 
bullet ; even the missionary needs passports and 
consuls and sometimes warships to protect him 
while he preaches. Virtue is indeed its own re- 
ward ; and it is so often its only reward. 

The life of the Christian is not an easy life. 
It would be worthless if it were. Real life is 
never a summer day's ramble. God never 
trifles with a man or woman by taking all the 
hills out of the landscape and all the stones out 
of the path. The books that faithfully portray 
life are not the pleasant stories for hammock 
reading, the Airy Fairy Lilians, the Trilbys, 
the Daisy Millers of my lady's boudoir. 



n6 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

They are the books in which Jean Valjean 
travails in agony and grows a soul, or Dr. 
Faustus plunges into the vortex of dissipation 
and goes downward with Mephistopheles. To 
be sure, this moody scholar is rescued eventu- 
ally — not by a soul struggle, however, but by 
a theological tenet, which reversion and rescue 
take place in the second part of the book. But 
the reading world has stamped the seal of its 
disapproval upon such bathos; who reads the 
second part of Faust ? 

Shakespeare sends Ophelia to her death in 
the "weeping brook," and strangles Desde- 
mona. Sophocles dooms Jocasta to the noose 
of the suicide and CEdipus to the brooch pins 
of his unhappy mother, that "smote his eyeballs 
to the root." Flaubert follows Madame Bo- 
vary with cold, keen impersonal detail as she 
passes from coquetry to sin, and from sin to 
jaded satiety, and from satiety to suicide; a 
harrowing progression, but a great book be- 
cause a book of real life. And even Dickens 
with all his optimism introduces no fortunate 
reprieve, in his Tale of Two Cities ; allows no 
sudden change of mood on the part of the wild 
mob that howled about the guillotine, but holds 
his relentless grip until the head of Sydney 
Carton drops into the bloody basket. Life is 
real, life is earnest, life is bluff and stern. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 117 

The hand that rounded Peter's dome 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome 
Wrought in a sad sincerity. 

If we want an easy life, then, let us drift 
down with the tide and get nowhere, and find 
no companionship save the gnats that hum in 
the lazy sunshine, and the dead fish that float 
in the stream. Do we object to the alarm 
clocks and time registers of these strenuous 
days? Then let us go out and live with the 
cattle that lie with half-shut eyes in the mead- 
ows, or with the pigs that contentedly wallow 
in the mire. Be an oyster and you will have 
no care about to-morrow's engagements, or 
concern about next year's rent. But be a man 
and you must fight for standing place in the 
world, and a mental grasp of the arts .and wars 
and discoveries of this fast and furious age. 

Christianity is not a system of laissez faire, 
not a Castle of Indolence. "Who are those 
which are arrayed in white robes?" asked the 
elder of Saint John, as he looked out upon the 
countless multitudes of all nations and tongues 
that praised God before the throne; and the 
answer was, "These are they which came out 
of great tribulation." Standing in the Hall of 
Fame yonder on the banks of the Hudson, I 
ask, "Who are these whose names appear here 
as the pride of a great people?" And the an- 



1 



n8 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

swer is the same : "These are they which came 
up through great tribulation of patient toil and 
painful sacrifice and fierce mental travail." 
"What is that?" I ask as the splendid starry 
banner of the republic breaks upon the breeze. 
Ah, this glorious ensign came up through much 
tribulation of battle smoke and patriots' blood, 
and awful shadowy years of home-burning 
and heart-breaking, to represent as it does to- 
day law and right and safety and civilization. 
There is no easy road to honor and the highest 
good ; there are no palace car accommodations 
on the route to the largest success. It is up- 
grade, and upgrades test the machinery and 
strain the heart. 

The heights by great men reached and kept 
Were not attained by sudden flight; 

But they while their companions slept 
Were toiling upward in the night. 

Christian led the way toward the Castle of 
Despair. Naturally, because Christian was the 
brains of the enterprise. He possessed to a 
high degree the power of initiative. He was 
sure to get into Doubting Castle at some time 
in his life. It takes brains to be an honest 
skeptic. Whoever thinks, will sometimes 
doubt. I do not refer to the silly chattering 
human cuckoo who sits in other men's nests 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



119 



and cackles other men's opinions. But there 
is a grade of mind that demands proof, and God 
does not always see fit to furnish proof — mathe- 
matical minds that are accustomed to dealing 
with hard and tangible verities, facts that may 
be measured and labeled and filed; and in the 
gray matter of such brains the Castle of the 
Giant is often builded. "What I do thou 
knowest not now, but thou shalt know here- 
after," is the challenge of Jesus; but there are 
some who are not content to wait, they de- 
mand immediate knowledge. They carry their 
scales and pocket compass into spiritual lati- 
tudes ; they know that two and two are always 
four, and that no supernatural jugglery can 
make it five. 

A Man once walked upon the Sea of 
Galilee. So reads the ancient record. Now, 
we know that no man can walk across the 
East River. It would solve the most serious 
problem in Brooklyn's future and bring a 
boom in the real estate market if it could be 
done. And yet there are times when it is pos- 
sible — that is, if the ice be not broken. The 
Egyptian fellah driving his buffalo to drink in 
the lower Nile would be as greatly puzzled if he 
should hear that the East River can be walked 
upon in winter as we are to hear that the Gali- 
lean Sea was once trodden with safety by 



r20 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

human feet. God does not stop to explain 
either phenomenon. We have learned to un- 
derstand one, perhaps some day we shall under- 
stand both. 

Lazarus came forth one eventful day from 
the grave in which his body had been buried. 
So reads the old chronicle. Marvelous, unpar- 
alleled event! Yet all last winter there hung 
in the sunshine in my study window a little 
gray bag picked off a twig by the roadside, and 
every day I looked to see a winged and beauti- 
ful fairy come out of it. If you will tell me 
how God can open that chrysalis in which lies 
an inert worm and bring out of it a butterfly, 
I will undertake to tell you how the stone 
was rolled back on Easter morning and the 
exultant angels came to welcome their risen 
Lord. 

We do not now attempt to prove the exist- 
ence of God by miracles. They are not so 
effective as "accrediting agencies" as they were 
in the days of our theological apprenticeship. 
To be sure, they will always be signs to those 
who need them. But we now claim the pos- 
sibility, the probability, of miracles from the 
fact of God. We say with Reuss, "If in the 
acts of Jesus there was nothing surpassing 
everyday experience, his history would be all 
the more incomprehensible"; or with Mar- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 121 

tineau, "Wherever God's hand is, there is 
miracle. It is simply indevoutness which imag- 
ines that only where miracle is can there be the 
real hand of God." 

We do not say that once the waters of the 
Red Sea were split asunder that a fugitive peo- 
ple might pass into the desert; once the stub- 
born walls of a great city fell down at the blast 
of rams' horns at the lips of stranger priests; 
once over five thousand hungry men were fed 
with a few loaves and fishes; therefore, the 
Being who did all this must be God. We say, 
"God is. He is here. He is God. If he need 
a miracle he can perform it, for he 'hath spoken 
once; twice have I heard this; that power be- 
longeth unto God.' " Believe this, my brother, 
and lean not to thine own understanding, but 
trust in the Lord with all thine heart; for the 
path of restless questioning leads so often to 
the Castle of Giant Despair. 

The man who has never been face to face 
with doubt is gifted with rare simplicity, or has 
never been very far from home. He has not 
stood much by the world's great highways. 
Much of our uncertainty — the fertile source of 
doubt — may be removed by demonstration. 
That which was a mystery to the fathers may 
be a domestic utility to the children. We are 
invading more and more the domain of the 



122 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

supernatural. We are pitching our tents each 
night on the skirmish line of the morning. 
Still there are some questions that cannot be 
answered, some doubts that cannot be dis- 
pelled, some specters that will not down. 

It is well to remember that God does not 
promise to make everything plain. He does not 
guarantee to be always the kind of deity we 
may expect him to be, nor to adjust the world 
to our preconceptions. He is not under con- 
tract to carry out any program we may arrange 
for him. Here is a man who blames God be- 
cause he has no employment and there is no 
bread in the family. His God is a masterwork- 
man whose business it is to keep his men em- 
ployed. Here is a mother whose child is taken 
away in spite of her earnest prayers, and at 
once God is impeached. What God? Her 
God, or rather God as she apprehends him, 
who is to be held responsible for the accidents 
of the nursery and the habitual violation of 
physical law. 

There are people who think it is God's busi- 
ness to keep things straight in this world. To 
them he is no better than a convenient ubiq- 
uitous chief of police who must look to it 
that murders are not committed, and injus- 
tice is pilloried, and saloons are not opened on 
Sunday. So, when disorders arise, of course 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 123 

God is derelict and must submit to an investiga- 
tion of his fidelity and his methods. 

We make the mistake of applying our time 
measurement to eternal areas. We seek to 
weigh the mountains in the grocer's scales. We 
do not allow for perspective. When Donatello 
finished the statue of Saint Mark it was in- 
spected by the linen workers of Florence who 
had ordered it constructed. They said it was 
out of proportion, that it was awkward in 
shape and lacked fidelity to life, and demanded 
that it be remodeled. The artist promised to 
make the work satisfactory. The statue was 
at that time in the studio. When next the linen 
workers came it had been lifted to the niche in 
front of the Or San Michele, for which it had 
been prepared. The worthy critics were en- 
tirely satisfied, and congratulated themselves 
upon their artistic taste. The figure had not 
been touched with the chisel. 

We make the same blunders in our judg- 
ments of God. We get him out of proper per- 
spective. We persist in bringing him down to 
sea level. He is so much larger than the meas- 
ure of man's mind. The limitless circle of his 
purpose sweeps in scarce perceptible curve 
above and beyond our mathematics and econo- 
mies. He does not forget the sparrows upon 
the housetops, but the stars that look down up- 



124 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



on the sparrow's nest are God's stars. He is 
holding the world for righteousness. His plans 
strike their roots down deep into two eternities. 
He steps from mountain peak to mountain peak 
in his progress toward the end of the path. We 
must come out into the open air. We must get 
our souls into a large place. We must walk all 
around God before we can judge him. When 
we thus know him in all the magnitude of his 
plans, and in all the tenderness of his mercy, 
then we shall not fear the mysteries of life and 
providence, for back of it all will be a loving 
God. 

And so they got into Doubting Castle, and a 
naughty place it was. 

Second : Let us watch the process by which 
they got out. You must remember that Chris- 
tian's companion was Hopeful. If I must go 
on some dark day to this dismal cell, may he be 
my companion in bonds! Giant Despair was 
brutal and strong, but he had fits on sunny 
days. Hopeful noticed this and said, "Some 
day we will give him the slip when he is down." 
It is never quite so bad but there is a fighting 
chance left. It does not always rain, and even 
when it does, "behind the clouds is the sun still 
shining." So long as we locate the golden age 
in the future, so long will we remain young, so 
long will we be unconquerable. And Hopeful 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 125 

saved Christian from the sin of suicide, kept 
him in good mental condition, and thus was 
he prepared to take advantage of the first 
opportunity to escape. 

But there was another little matter that must 
be taken into account. Giant Despair was mar- 
ried. There was a woman in the case. It is 
well to find out about a man's wife before you 
go far with him. In nine cases out of ten it is 
the wind blowing from that quarter which de- 
cides how fast you will sail, and what port you 
will enter. A man must get his wife's consent 
to be respectable and to be respected. There is 
many a great man standing proud and self- 
confident on a monument, looking serenely out 
upon an admiring world, who ought to step 
down and let his wife get up in his place. The 
world would never have heard of him if he 
had remained a bachelor. And there is many 
a man whose wife has been his evil star. 

The wife of Giant Despair was named Diffi- 
dence, and in subtlety and relentless treachery 
she was worse than her husband. And this 
woman stands forever at the gate of Doubting 
Castle and lets the multitude in: Diffidence 
which keeps thousands of earnest Christians 
from lives of usefulness, deprives them of the 
joy of service, pushes them back from places 
they can fill and ought to fill, and dooms them 



126 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

to fruitless inactivity and spiritual pauperism; 
Diffidence, correctly named Self-consciousness, 
which comes of thinking about ourselves all the 
time, and conceiving that other people have no 
better employment; Diffidence which is only a 
subtle pride that finds its expression in the 
famous couplet : 

O wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursel's as ithers see us; 

and needs some such shock as came to the other 
poet who says : 

I wished one day with Burns some power'd gie 
The gift by means of which myself I'd see, 
As to the watching world I seemed to be. 

And as it chanced some fairy came my way 
And granted me the wish I'd made that day ; 
And, oh! it filled my soul with blank dismay. 

For as I looked, ah, how my pride did fall, — 
Aghast I staggered back against the wall : 
The world had not a thought of me at all. 

Do you know what was the fate of this 
woman ? Turn to the second book of the vol- 
ume and you will learn that she was killed by 
old Mr. Honest. Sturdy old soul, kindly and 
modest, blushing like a boy when praised, he 
came from the town of Stupidity, and he knew 
nothing else to do, so he cut the truculent 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 127 

giantess down with a blow when she joined her 
husband in his attack upon the later pilgrims. 

"I say to every man that is among you, not 
to think of himself more highly than he ought 
to think ; but to think soberly, according as God 
hath dealt to every man the measure of faith" ; 
and with that faith, the powers and responsi- 
bilities that attend upon it. 

If the truth were known, our friends in the 
prison yonder have not prayed from Wednes- 
day morning to Saturday night. This is their 
dire and bewildering confession. But on Sat- 
urday night they begin to pray. Now look 
out for miracles. The power which moves the 
hand which moves the world has been turned 
on. The earth which stopped still in the dark 
and midnight has begun to revolve again, and 
the mountain tops will soon be radiant with 
the morning. Then, while they prayed, Chris- 
tian found a key in his pocket called Promise, 
and said he in glad excitement, "What a fool 
am I ! this key will open any lock in Doubting 
Castle." The key of Promise ! He had it all 
the time. It is part of the inalienable posses- 
sions of every life traveler. 

The key of Promise will unlock any door. 
Shut up, are you, in the bitter cell of sin, foul 
and festering and deadly; despairing because 
you cannot heal yourself? This Promise will 



128 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

open the door: "If we confess our sins, he is 
faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to 
cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Shut up 
in the cell of awful providences, with black 
walls and darkened windows that look out upon 
a cemetery ; despairing because the best things 
of life are gone? This Promise will open the 
door and let the sunshine in: "The Lord will 
not cast off forever : but though he cause grief, 
yet will he have compassion according to the 
multitude of his mercies. For he doth not 
afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men." 
Shut up in the cell of helplessness; seeing the 
hard things of life; wondering if God be true 
and kind and if there be any good worth living 
for ? These words will steady the soul and let 
us out into the green pastures of his favor: 
"Fear thou not ; for I am with thee : be not dis- 
mayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen 
thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold 
thee with the right hand of my righteousness." 

Use the Key; try the Book; prove the 
Promises. 

And this is how they came out of the castle. 

^ X T*ELL, on Saturday, about mid- 
YY night, they began to pray, and 
continued in prayer till almost 
break of day. 

Now, a little before it was day, good 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



129 



Christian, as one half amazed, brake out in 
this passionate speech: "What a fool," 
quoth he, "am I, thus to lie in a stinking 
dungeon, when I may as well walk at lib- 
erty! I have a key in my bosom, called 
Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open 
any lock in Doubting Castle." Then said 
Hopeful, "That is good news; good 
brother, pluck it out of thy bosom, and 
try." 

Then Christian pulled it out of his 
bosom, and began to try at the dungeon 
door, whose bolt, as he turned the key, 
gave back, and the door flew open with 
ease, and Christian and Hopeful both came 
out. Then he went to the outward door 
that leads into the castle yard, and, with 
his key, opened that door also. After, he 
went to the iron gate, for that must be 
opened too; but that lock went desper- 
ately hard, yet the key did open it. Then 
they thrust open the gate to make their 
escape with speed, but that gate, as it 
opened, made such a creaking that it waked 
Giant Despair, who, hastily rising to pur- 
sue his prisoners, felt his limbs to fail, for 
his fits took him again, so that he could by 
no means go after them. Then they went 
on, and came to the King's highway, and 
so were safe, because they were out of his 
jurisdiction. 



NIGHT THE EIGHTH 

THE DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS— REST 
AND REFRESHMENT 



And the mirage shall become a pool, and the thirsty 
ground springs of water: in the habitation of jackals, 
where they lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.— 
Isaiah. 




NIGHT THE EIGHTH 

The Delectable Mountains — Rest and 
Refreshment 

|ANITY FAIR represents the 
pleasures of the world. The 
Delectable Mountains represent 
the pleasures of the Christian. 
One is in the town, stone-paved, 
brick-walled, noisy; the others are under the 
wide skies where the winds blow and the eagles 
nest. Man-made, God-made; crowded with 
earth smells and labyrinthed with sewers, or 
looking toward the stars and nursing the young 
rivers that are by and by to fertilize the plains — 
so stand contrasted the good of the lower life 
and the good of the higher life. 

THEY went then till they came to 
the Delectable Mountains, which 
mountains belong to the Lord of 
that hill of which we have spoken before; 
so they went up to the mountains, to be- 
hold the gardens and orchards, the vine- 
yards and fountains of water; where also 
they drank and washed themselves, and did 
freely eat of the vineyards. Now, there 

133 



134 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

were on the tops of these mountains shep- 
herds feeding their flocks, and they stood 
by the highway side. The pilgrims there- 
fore went to them, and leaning upon their 
staves (as is common with weary pil- 
grims, when they stand to talk with any by 
the way), they asked, "Whose Delectable 
Mountains are these? And whose be the 
sheep that feed upon them?" 

Shep. These mountains are Immanuel's 
Land, and they are within sight of his city ; 
and the sheep also are his, and he laid 
down his life for them. 

Chr. Is this the way to the Celestial 
City? 

Shep. You are just in your way. 

Chr. How far is it thither? 

Shep. Too far for any but those that 
shall get thither indeed. 

Chr. Is the way safe or dangerous? 

Shep. Safe for those for whom it is to 
be safe; "but the transgressors shall fall 
therein." 

Chr. Is there, in this place, any relief 
for pilgrims that are weary and faint in 
the way? 

Shep. The Lord of these mountains 
hath given us a charge not to be "forgetful 
to entertain strangers," therefore the good 
of the place is before you. 

I saw also in my dream that, when the 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 135 

shepherds perceived that they were way- 
faring men, they also put questions to 
them (to which they made answer as in 
other places), as, "Whence came you?" 
and, "How got you into the way?" and, 
"By what means have you so persevered 
therein? for but few of them that begin to 
come hither do show their face on these 
mountains." But when the shepherds 
heard their answers, being pleased there- 
with, they looked very lovingly upon them, 
and said, "Welcome to the Delectable 
Mountains." 

The mountains are Immanuel's Land. They 
are part of the scheme. 

God wants his children to be happy. Delect- 
able Mountains stand along the path of holiness 
all the way to the end. The road to heaven 
lies through the best parts of the earth. If 
there be no heaven the Christian has gotten the 
most out of this world. If when he come down 
to the end he shall discover that he has been 
mistaken, that death ends all, that he has 
already had all there is, and if he were asked 
what he would do should he with his present 
knowledge be permitted to live over again, he 
would answer, "I would come by the same path, 
for it is the path of peace." Other men have 
been disturbed by every rumor. His trust has 



136 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

been in a power that never falters, and in an 
infinite love that never fails. Other lives have 
been cursed by vile passions, inflamed by un- 
holy ambitions, and enslaved by evil habits. In 
quietness and confidence has been his strength. 
Preparing himself for the future he has been 
in the best possible condition to enjoy the pres- 
ent; looking for heaven he has discovered the 
earth. 

There is nothing that belongs to God but he 
wants us to have it and to get the best use of it. 
Nothing of this world is too good for the chil- 
dren of the King. All that he asks is that we 
forget ourselves in the general good. Then 
may we gather flowers from every garden and 
fruits from every field; and verily the earth 
shall be ours and the fullness thereof. 

There are so many of us who are ready to 
serve God, yet who do not delight in him ; will- 
ing to take refuge in Christianity as a strong 
tower in danger, but not able to look on it as 
a pleasure resort. The religion of Jesus is 
represented as a guide to lead the soul to 
heaven, but many there are who do not seem to 
expect that it will enter heaven with us, that 
even heaven would be cheerless without it, that 
indeed its business is to start a branch office of 
heaven here on earth. 

The Christian faith is so often made unat- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 137 

tractive to the young by our teaching 1 . With 
doleful melancholy and with portentous empha- 
sis we tell them that death is coming and that 
Christianity is the best preparation for death, 
until they begin to conceive that this is the only 
purpose of Christianity. The Church becomes 
an undertaker's establishment, whose only busi- 
ness it is to get everybody ready for his own 
funeral. They are told that they must not be- 
come Christians too early ; they must wait until 
they can realize the awful seriousness of the 
step and be ready to surrender all the bright 
things of life. 

God is represented as a harsh, stern, irascible 
personage who spends the most of his time 
at the keyhole, or sending thunderstorms upon 
disobedient children, or making thin places in 
the ice if they venture out to skate on Sunday. 
The God of the average nursery is often a 
Being whom the children would be afraid to 
meet in the dark. He frowns but he does not 
smile, and his temper is shockingly uncertain. 

Then, how has the Bible been taught ? Many 
of our children know more about Ananias and 
Sapphira and their untimely end than about 
Lydia, the good woman of Thessalonica who 
took the disciples home with her to dinner and 
kept them at her house for a week. 

I once heard some one ask a prominent lee- 



138 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



turer what novels our boys and girls might 
read with safety. He promptly answered, 
"Any novels except those in a Sunday school 
library." But a better day has dawned for the 
Sunday school library. Some of us can remem- 
ber when the Sunday school books were som- 
ber-backed and cheerless ; where all the wicked 
boys died of bird-nesting — the only healthful 
amusement in the book — and the good boys 
died of pale and underfed piety — and a very 
dangerous disease it is when it takes a serious 
turn — with turtledoves mourning in the wil- 
lows and a bundle of musty tracts lying on the 
window sill. 

We have made the service of God unattract- 
ive to many by our example. The stale old 
question as to whether Christianity is a failure 
or not cannot yet be answered, as real Chris- 
tianity has not yet been fully tried. It has 
never yet had a fair chance in the world. There 
are two chapters of the Bible that represent en- 
tirely different phases of Christian life — the 
seventh and eighth chapters of Romans. The 
seventh chapter represents Paul in the storm of 
conviction and uncertainty. "I am carnal," he 
cries, "sold under sin." "The good that I 
would I do not: but the evil which I would 
not, that I do." "O wretched man that I am ! 
who shall deliver me from the body of this 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 139 

death?" The whole chapter is a seething whirl- 
pool of unrest and soul-torture. 

The eighth chapter is the breaking of the 
day, the uprising of the sun. It is separated 
from the seventh by the breadth of an eternity. 
It begins, "There is therefore now no con- 
demnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, 
who walk not after the flesh, but after the 
Spirit." It declares, "Ye have not received 
the spirit of bondage again to fear ; but ye have 
received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, 
Abba, Father." It ventures to say, "The Spirit 
itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we 
are the children of God." It swells to a mighty 
Hallelujah Chorus at its close as the exultant 
apostle shouts, "For I am persuaded, that 
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princi- 
palities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any 
other creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord." 

So many Christians are content to abide in 
the seventh chapter ! This seems to represent 
their highest spiritual ambition. If they ever 
get into the eighth chapter they go there on a 
sort of picnic or field day, on Sunday or at the 
prayer meeting, but they usually go meekly 
back into the seventh chapter for workaday life. 



140 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



A man stood with his little son on Mount 
Washington. Pointing northward toward the 
ice fields of Canada, and southward toward the 
sunny lands that lie under the tropic sun, and 
eastward where the Atlantic beats its musical 
measure along its iron coast, and westward 
over the prairies and forests and farms that 
stretch toward the Pacific, he said, as he swept 
his hand around the horizon, "My son, God's 
love is as big as all that." "Then, father," an- 
swered the boy, with shining face, "we are 
right in the middle of it !" Right in the middle 
of it, always in the middle of it, and no changes 
of season or place need make any change in 
our mind. 

In these Delectable Mountains there are 
flocks of sheep and shepherds, and the names 
of the shepherds suggest how the pleasures of 
the Christian are to be chosen. For instance, 
the name of the first shepherd is Knowledge. 
This is a good beginning. Here is a stanch old 
shepherd whose head is clear and whose hands 
are steady. 

He who binds 
His soul to knowledge steals the key of heaven. 



In his pursuit of pleasure the Christian is not 
left to his unassisted personal judgment. To 
be sure, this must be exercised, but that is not 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 141 

enough. "There is a way that seemeth right 
unto a man, yet the end of that way is death." 
Mistakes have been made when judgment was 
wide-awake. Awful catastrophes have come 
even when as far as could be seen the very best 
was being done. Alexius, the young emperor 
of Constantinople, alarmed by an attack upon 
his palace, fled by a secret stairway which he 
supposed would lead to safety. It was a mis- 
take in judgment from lack of knowledge. The 
staircase led to a prison where he was stripped 
and strangled. Andree swung himself free to 
drift by balloon across the arctic circle, and the 
great mysterious North swallowed him up and 
kept silent. Human judgment is lord of many 
lands, but it is not overlord. 

The name of this first shepherd is not Con- 
science. Somehow this would-be keeper of the 
fold does not appear on the mountains. He is 
not trusted among the Master's flocks. Indeed, 
the sheep would go astray if he were shepherd. 
Life will be very irregular and capricious if 
what is popularly called Conscience be the only 
guide. It is not to be trusted ; it takes bribes ; 
it has no settled policy ; it laughs at consistency. 
What it cannot prevent, it will after a while 
forget to condemn. It is a parrot that may be 
taught any language; a weathervane that will 
turn with any wind ; a dog that will follow any 



142 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



master ; a Vicar of Bray that will espouse any 
creed. 

Paul draws a very sharp distinction between 
conscience that is enlightened and one that is 
unenlightened in his treatment of meat offered 
to idols, and suggests that a weak conscience 
may be a very uncomfortable thing to be at 
large in a community. It has power to disturb 
and distress a whole neighborhood, and set a 
whole church in an uproar. Lurking in the 
shadow of one man's heart it may deprive an- 
other of that which would be perfectly innocent. 
No man, then, can submit entirely to his con- 
science until it has been at school. It is not 
proof that the way is right when conscience 
seems at home there. It is not always true that 
a pleasure is safe because conscience acts as 
doorkeeper. The word itself means "to know 
with," and there must be a knowledge of the 
divine law in order that its dicta may be safe 
and reliable. 

The second shepherd is Experience: the 
experience of others, let us say. No ship is 
safe without compass and chart. Both are 
needed. Each supplements the other. The 
compass shows the direction to port; the chart 
indicates the dangers by the way. One is 
Knowledge, the other is Experience. Leif 
Ericson had neither chart nor compass when 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 143 

with his five and thirty companions he sailed 
southeast from Greenland, stumbled upon a 
vast continent, then blundered along its coast 
from the slaty cliffs of Labrador to the grape- 
vines of Martha's Vineyard. And nothing 
came of his adventure. Columbus had compass 
but no proper chart when he steered away 
from Spain seeking the nothern end of Japan, 
and reached the West India Islands — a blunder 
which our seamen can scarcely understand. 

The chart is made by men who have passed 
this way before. It is a contribution from the 
past to the present; old age bestowing its wis- 
dom upon youth without at the same time trans- 
ferring its decay. We are to "give earnest heed 
to the things which we have heard, lest at any 
time we should let them slip." We are to sit 
humbly at the feet of those "long traveled in 
the ways of men." With the ancient is wisdom, 
and in length of days understanding. It is so 
much pleasanter to learn by the mistakes of 
others than by our own. What other men have 
done and have learned and have suffered is 
written upon the path ahead and we may read 
it as we run. What we have done and have 
learned is behind our back, and only the mem- 
ory of all this can help us in our life to-day. 
One is the headlight of the train, and it shows 
us whether the track is clear or not. The other 



144 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

is the sternlight of the ship, and it may make 
the white wake of the swift vessel brilliant and 
beautiful, but we are not going that way. Why 
go through all the quagmires to learn how 
muddy they are when we may study the gar- 
ments of others who have waded there ? Why 
begin where our fathers began, when we may 
just as easily begin where they left off? 

And so we have for our guidance the expe- 
rience of others. The Discipline of the Church, 
the Confessions and Creeds are the crystalliza- 
tion of experience ; the wisdom of the wise put 
up in convenient forms for the benefit of the 
ignorant. Our fathers may not have known 
any more than we do, but they have been this 
way before. If they say that the theater is mis- 
leading, that the dance is dangerous, and that 
games of chance are questionable, it is not 
guesswork. They are speaking that which 
they know. It is the result of their observa- 
tion; perhaps in some cases, let us admit, the 
testimony of their own experience. So, if we 
do not obey all this as law, it is profitable to 
listen to it as counsel. The old shepherd Expe- 
rience has been on the mountains a long while, 
and, generally speaking, he is a pretty safe 
guide. 

The third shepherd is Watchful. This 
name suggests our part in the scheme. By 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



145 



watchfulness we may analyze and appraise the 
experience of others; we may also utilize our 
own observation. We must subject the pleas- 
ures of life to a strict inquisition, for poison 
comes to us in the honeyed cells of pleasure, and 
death as an angel of light. Does your heart go 
out to some delicious pleasure in which you in- 
dulge ? Call in the keen-eyed shepherd Watch- 
ful. Does the indulgence make you careless of 
the Church, or of the Bible, or of God ? Does 
it attract attention and cause comment ? Do not 
go to a place which needs your presence to make 
it respectable. It is too great a strain upon 
you and will break you down. You may be 
able to sweeten such a place or pastime for a 
while, but you will soon need something to 
sweeten you. Watch, therefore, the effect of 
any indulgence upon yourself. Turn on the 
light. Give caution the benefit of the doubt. 
If there is any question as to the result, you had 
better let it alone. Better cut off the arm and 
enter into life maimed than with both arms go 
the downgrade of spiritual carelessness. Better 
go a little slower in time than to limp through 
eternity. 

The name of the fourth shepherd is Sincere. 
Much discussion has been held to settle the 
derivation of the word. Some claim it is from 
the Greek and means "with the heart" ; others 



146 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

derive it from sine cera, which means "without 
wax," and explain it with Cicero as referring 
it to honey clarified and free from impurities. 
Others yet claim it was used in reference to a 
piece of statuary which has been made of a 
perfect block of marble in which there are no 
flaws to be concealed by wax. The word 
means to be what we seem. It is that style of 
living which does not change when company 
comes. It never poses in the limelight nor plays 
to the galleries. It never studies the evening 
paper to learn what the world has said about 
us through the day, nor the morning paper to 
learn what will be the popular thing to do next. 
It is that being true to oneself in which is the 
promise and pledge that we will not be false 
to any man. 

Miles Standish sends John Alden to propose 
marriage to Priscilla in the name of his supe- 
rior. The poor fellow blunders in the message. 
It is not to be wondered at. His loyalty is 
pledged to Standish, but his love is given to 
the maiden and his message is a burlesque. 
At their next meeting the keen-witted damsel 
looks into his conscious, bewildered face and 
says: 

"Let us, then, be what we are, and speak what we think, 

and in all things 
Keep ourselves loyal to truth." 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 147 

To be sure, sincerity is not all that is neces- 
sary. There have been sincere pagans. Many 
a sincere mother has tossed her baby girl into 
the Ganges. Saul of Tarsus in all sincerity 
started for Damascus to strangle the young 
Christianity there. Sincerity, therefore, does 
not give us all the light we need. But it is the 
best possible condition in which to receive light. 
A sincere man will find what he is looking for. 
He that willeth to do the will of the Father 
shall know of the doctrine. We shall some day 
catch a glimpse of the city towers if we ask the 
way to Zion with our faces thitherward. The 
camera will find a star unseen by the eye and 
undiscovered by the most powerful telescope. 
It looks straight into the spaces and keeps on 
looking until the star appears. A duty done 
will stand out clear and distinct before us if we 
keep looking for it. A danger cannot remain 
concealed from the sincere soul. 

And thus are the preserves of Christian 
pleasure guarded and kept: 

1. A clear Knowledge of God's will. 

2. A humble reverence for the mature Expe- 
rience of those whose "silver hairs will pur- 
chase us a good opinion." 

3. A keen, intelligent, relentless Watchful- 
ness of our own life. 

4. A perfect Sincerity. 



148 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

With these we may walk the Delectable 
Mountains and fear no slipping of the foot 
along the steep precipices; yea, we may tread 
even the far places of life, the paths that wind 
through the territories of darkness, for "the 
evil beasts will cease out of the land, and we 
shall dwell safely in the wilderness and sleep in 
the woods." 



NIGHT THE NINTH 

EN PASSANT— THE MAN WHO KNOWS 

EVERYTHING AND THE MAN 

WHO KNOWS NOTHING 



Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the delegates 
from Pennsylvania, was so much distressed at the diffi- 
culties which arose and the prospect of failure that he 
proposed that the Convention, as all human means of 
obtaining agreement seemed to be useless, should open 
its meeting with prayer. — James Bryce, on the Conven- 
tion which drafted the Constitution of the United States. 




NIGHT THE NINTH 

En Passant — The Man Who Knows 

Everything and The Man Who 

Knows Nothing 

|E have not the time to interview 
all the strangers met by our pil- 
grims on the way. There was 
no lack of adventure. It was 
apparently a well-traveled coun- 
try through which they passed. All the Chris- 
tian graces, and many others that were neither 
Christian nor graces, seemed to be out for an 
airing. Nor can we stop to analyze the con- 
versations held with these various passers-by. 
They all talked by the book. Whenever our 
good author wished to elucidate an abstruse 
doctrine, or to illustrate an abstract truth, or to 
beguile the tedium of the way, he started some 
one talking. "From grave to gay, from lively 
to severe," they ranged the wide fields of con- 
versation. 

It must, however, be confessed that the con- 
versations reported are more like the Dialogues 
of Plato or the questions and answers of a civil 
service examination than the easy interchange 

151 



152 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

of thought that serves to shorten time and dis- 
tance with the ordinary traveler. We have 
chosen two of the many wayfarers with whom 
we are to become better acquainted : The Man 
Who Knows Everything and The Man Who 
Knows Nothing. 

The first is named Ignorance, a brisk lad 
whom they met soon after leaving the Delect- 
able Mountains. 

AND I slept, and dreamed again, and 
saw the same two pilgrims going 
down the mountains along the high- 
way toward the city. Now, a little below 
these mountains, on the left hand, lieth 
the country of Conceit; from which coun- 
try there comes, into the way in which the 
pilgrims walked, a little crooked lane. 
Here, therefore, they met with a very brisk 
lad, that came out of that country; and his 
name was Ignorance. So Christian asked 
him from what parts he came, and whither 
he was going. 

Ignor. Sir, I was born in the country 
that lieth off there, a little on the left hand, 
and I am going to the Celestial City. 

Chr. But how do you think to get in 
at the gate? for you may find some diffi- 
culty there. 

"As other good people do," said Igno- 
rance. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 153 

Chr. But what have you to show at that 
gate, that may cause that the gate should 
be opened to you? 

Ignor. I know my Lord's will, and I 
have been a good liver; I pay every man 
his own ; I pray, fast, pay tithes, and give 
alms, and have left my country for whither 
I am going. 

Chr. But thou earnest not in at the 
wicket gate that is at the head of this way ; 
thou earnest in hither through that same 
crooked lane, and therefore I fear, how- 
ever thou mayest think of thyself, when 
the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt 
have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief 
and a robber, instead of getting admittance 
into the city. 

Ignor. Gentlemen, ye be utter strangers 
to me ; I know you not. Be content to fol- 
low the religion of your country, and I will 
follow the religion of mine. I hope all will 
be well. And as for the gate that you talk 
of, all the world knows that that is a great 
way off of our country. I cannot think that 
any man in all our parts doth so much as 
know the way to it; nor need they matter 
whether they do or no, since we have, as 
you see, a fine, pleasant green lane, that 
comes down from our country, the next 
way into the way. 

You will notice that this sprightly young gen- 



154 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

tleman is from the country of Conceit. This 
is just the place to look for him. That is why 
we call him "The Man who Knows Every- 
thing." The observant author of the Book of 
Proverbs had met him, and said of him, "Seest 
thou a man wise in his own conceit; there is 
more hope of a fool than of him." There is an 
old Arab saying that man is four : 

The man who knows not and knows not he knows not, 

he is a fool — shun him. 
The man who knows not and knows he knows not, he 

is simple — teach him. 
The man who knows and knows not he knows, he is 

asleep — waken him. 
The man who knows and knows that he knows, he is 

wise — follow him. 

Forevermore the name of Braddock will be 
ingloriously linked with our colonial history. 
He had forty years' experience in European 
warfare, and the rank of major-general, but 
because he was not willing to concede that there 
might be something he needed to learn he threw 
away a splendid army and his own life in the 
wilderness. James II told his Parliament that 
they had no more right to question him than 
to question the Almighty ; and he died in exile. 
Really great men are modest. Their ideals 
are so much larger than their attainments, what 
they would be is so far beyond what they are, 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



155 



that they find no place for boasting. It takes 
such a very small puddle to make an ocean for 
a minnow, and as he moves him back and forth 
in his little pool of muddy water he says, "What 
a great stir I am making in the world!" 
"Sketches, only sketches," said Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds impatiently, when some one spoke in exu- 
berant praise of his masterpieces. Yet you and 
I have seen some astonishing drawings of an 
impossible castle by the side of an inconceivable 
lake, splashed all over with ghastly moonshine 
and scrawled with pea-green ivy, and the board- 
ing school miss who perpetrated this chromatic 
monstrosity is fully expecting it to be hung in 
the first row of the Royal Academy. 

But ignorance is no crime. Let us thank 
God that it is not. So many of his people are 
ignorant, but not with the kind of ignorance 
that is peculiar to the country of Conceit. God 
has a great patience with those who do not 
know. This poor lad, with all his self-asser- 
tion and presumption, went to the very gates of 
the Celestial City, and all the way along there 
were opportunities for his instruction and his 
help. The priest of ancient Israel was com- 
manded to make special atonement for the soul 
that sinned in ignorance. The God whom the 
Athenians ignorantly worshiped sent his serv- 
ant Paul to declare his true nature. And this 



156 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

same Paul, after branding himself as a blas- 
phemer and a persecutor, pathetically adds, 
"but I obtained mercy, because I did it igno- 
rantly in unbelief." Jesus came into the world 
because the world was ignorant. It is only 
when this ignorance is the offspring or the 
mother of conceit; when it refuses to realize 
itself; when it rejects and repudiates instruc- 
tion — only then it becomes a crime. 

It is our business to know, and to help others 
to know. Lord Bacon said years ago that 
knowledge is power. So it is : power to send 
the iron ships plowing the green seas, power to 
plant steepled cities, to build mighty empires. 
Knowledge is power — and so is ignorance. 
One builds, the other breaks; one makes, the 
other mars. It was ignorance that destroyed 
the Alexandrian library and the records of the 
ancient Mexicans, these latter because the big- 
oted priests of Cortez feared the contamination 
of the pagan manuscripts, records that would 
be of value passing all estimate to-day. It was 
ignorance that locked the prison door upon 
Galileo, whose lofty spirit walked the uncharted 
skies, and handicapped the ardent Columbus, 
who had caught in his dreams a vision of new 
worlds. It was ignorance that made an outlaw 
of William Lloyd Garrison and broke the print- 
ing press of Elijah Parish Lovejoy. Igno- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



157 



ranee has blocked the wheels of progress, stifled 
the spirit of invention, stained its hand in the 
blood of martyrs, and strangled the highest and 
noblest aspirations of the soul. 

God wants us to know. He has a place on 
the ramparts of Christianity for the mightiest 
intellect that ever swung the battle-ax in the 
struggle between right and wrong. 

The more thoroughly the intellect is trained 
the more readily it accepts the fundamental 
facts of God and the Bible and the Christian 
religion. It is a tremendous mistake, one that 
dies hard but one that has got to die, that 
ignorance is the mother of devotion. Men of 
brains are men of God. It is the tyro who 
objects; the shallow drinker at the Pierian 
spring who is intoxicated ; the sophomore who 
can give the professor varied and valuable in- 
formation; the raw recruit who chafes at the 
discipline of the camp. 

The great brain recognizes limitations and 
grapples the relentless inference. It says with 
John Stuart Mill, "It is of no use to claim 
that Christ is not historical. Who among his 
disciples was capable of inventing his sayings 
or of imagining his life and character?" It 
says : Suppose Moses did not write the Penta- 
teuch, and David did not write the Psalms, and 
Daniel did not write the Prophecy — what then ? 



158 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



These books are here; they are matchless pro- 
ductions ; they blaze as stars of the first magni- 
tude in the literary sky ; they open for us a new 
moral world; somebody must be responsible 
for them, and what difference does it make 
who it is? Shakespeare may never have ex- 
isted, and the grave in the old church at Strat- 
ford may be empty, but we have Macbeth and 
Hamlet and King Lear, and if there were no 
Shakespeare, then the man who pretended to be 
Shakespeare and wrote in his name and de- 
ceived the world is greater than the Shakes- 
peare in whom we believe. 

If there be no Jesus and no cross and no real 
story of his life, then a dream, a figment of the 
imagination, a delusion of the brain has, ac- 
cording to the claim of Lecky, done more to 
regenerate and soften mankind than all the 
philosophers and moralists that ever lived. 
The trained intellect sees the absurdity of this 
and bows with uncovered head before the 
Christ. 

It is our business to know. The times of 
ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth 
man everywhere to repent. This is now the 
condemnation — if condemnation there be — that 
light has come into the world and men love 
darkness rather than light. Light is all about 
us. The latest word from astronomy is that 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



159 



space may not be all dark. That it is dark has 
been the teaching of the years. How graphic 
have been the word-pictures : the earth plung- 
ing through the blackness of night; the light 
beams from the sun speeding through the chaos 
of darkness to break in beauty and gleam upon 
the resisting atmosphere. But other theories 
are coming. Light has been found, we are 
told, where erstwhile darkness was supreme. 
Primeval night is being driven beyond the 
bounds of space. This sable-vested queen is 
robbed of her first estate. 

Since God is light, 
And never but in unapproached light 
Dwelt from eternity. 



We are finding light everywhere even as we 
are finding God everywhere. He who is igno- 
rant of truth now is willfully, deliberately 
ignorant, and such ignorance is sin. The Bible, 
the great hymns of the Church, the religious 
services, the whispers within of the willing 
Spirit of God — all these minister to our edifica- 
tion, help to make us wise unto salvation, and 
we neglect them at our peril. 

The second man to be introduced is named 
Atheist. An ugly word is this, but Bunyan 
does not mince matters. His language is Ar- 
cadian ; his spades are spades. 



160 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

NOW, after a while they perceived, 
afar off, one coming softly and 
alone, all along the highway, to 
meet them. Then said Christian to his 
fellow, "Yonder is a man with his back to- 
ward Zion, and he is coming to meet us." 

Hope. I see him; let us take heed to 
ourselves now, lest he should prove a flat- 
terer also. So he drew nearer and nearer, 
and at last came up unto them. His name 
was Atheist, and he asked them whither 
they were going. 

Chr. We are going to Mount Zion. 

Then Atheist fell into a very great 
laughter. 

Chr. What is the meaning of your 
laughter? 

Atheist. I laugh to see what ignorant 
persons you are, to take upon you so te- 
dious a journey, and you are like to have 
nothing but your travel for your pains. 

Chr. Why, man, do you think we shall 
not be received? 

Atheist. Received! There is no such 
place as you dream of in all this world. 

Chr. But there is in the world to 
come. 

Atheist. When I was at home in mine 
own country, I heard as you now affirm; 
and from that hearing went out to see, and 
have been seeking this city this twenty 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



161 



years, but find no more of it than I did the 
first day I set out. 

Chr. We have both heard and believe 
that there is such a place to be found. 

Atheist. Had not I, when at home, be- 
lieved, I had not come thus far to seek ; but 
finding none (and yet I should, had there 
been such a place to be found, for I have 
gone to seek it further than you), I am go- 
ing back again, and will seek to refresh 
myself with the things I then cast away 
for hopes of that which, I now see, is not. 



We call him The Man who Knows Nothing. 
In these days his name would be Agnostic. But 
in John Bunyan's time this classical term had 
not been invented ; at any rate, it had not been 
transferred from the Unknown God to the un- 
knowing philosopher ; nor had it become fash- 
ionable to advertise one's lack of knowledge. 
The author of our book antedated Kant by a 
century, and Kant was the unconscious father 
of modern agnostics. He was followed by Mr. 
Mill, who holds that "Whatever relates to God 
is a matter of inference" ; and by Mr. Spencer, 
who declares that "Any conception of God is 
literally unthinkable." Then, later, Grant Al- 
len sums it all up by saying that Deity is an 
"evolved and abstract conception of the human 
mind." 



l62 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



Well, I suppose that settles it. If God, as a 
Person, is unthinkable to such splendid intel- 
lects as these ; if he exist as an abstract propo- 
sition only, analogous to such ideas as space 
or time or the Tropic of Cancer, then it is not 
worth while for the rest of us to try to think 
him out! 

Serious loss is this for some. The world has 
been a hard place, the struggle has been desper- 
ate, sorrows have been bitter. The one thing 
that has comforted has been the thought of a 
personal God as Friend and Companion. We 
have looked for his hand when the way has 
been dark. But there is not much help in an 
"abstract conception." It has no place to stand 
on. It has no local habitation or name. We 
do not know where it lives. We can never be 
sure that it is in any way concerned about us. 
The fact is that many of us do not know what 
"an evolved and abstract conception of the 
mind" means anyhow. And so this modern 
theory, this theory that nothing can be known 
about God, makes life unspeakably lonely. 



Great God ! I'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 163 

And to add to our sense of loss, those who 
take God away are flippant and careless over 
our loss. This man Atheist is introduced with 
a great laugh upon his lips: "I laugh to see 
what ignorant persons you are, to take upon 
you so tedious a journey, and you are like to 
have nothing but your travel for your pains." 

History often repeats itself; and allegory 
sometimes becomes history. A celebrated lec- 
ture was given up and down the land some 
years ago, and it was full of mirth. To be sure, 
it was in answer to the profoundest question 
that ever stirred human hearts, "What must I 
do to be saved ?" To be sure, the lecturer him- 
self acknowledged that "for thousands of years 
the world has been asking this question." To 
be sure, this question comes to us heavy with 
the atmosphere of the Philippian prison and 
somber with the dusky shadows of the midnight 
earthquake. Yet, according to the newspaper 
reports of this lecture, the answer to the ques- 
tion was in such temper that the audience again 
and again broke out into uproarious laughter. 

We want men to be serious when dealing 
with serious things. An incident is related of 
Mr. Cleveland which greatly increases our re- 
spect for him. One day when he was Presi- 
dent of the United States he entered his office 
in Washington and found a friend in his chair. 



164 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

In the spirit of sport this friend greeted Mr. 
Cleveland as if the latter were an applicant for 
office. There was laughter for a while, and 
then Mr. Cleveland walked over to a window 
and gazed out upon the city. His friend 
crossed over and found him with tears in his 
eyes. "It is well enough," he said, "to play 
President, but the reality is awfully serious. 
On that desk are several applications for the 
pardon of men who are condemned to death, 
and I have got to settle their fate. This takes 
all levity out of the heart." 

The pilot who tells you in the wild of the 
stormy night that he does not know the chan- 
nel, that he is unable to guide the poor ship to 
safety, and then laughs about it, is not the man 
to be trusted with the helm again. The doctor, 
standing over your curly-headed boy when the 
breath is growing faint and the eyes are grow- 
ing dim, who tells you that he is ignorant of 
the disease and helpless to avert the disaster, 
and who laughs merrily at your dismay, will 
not be called in the next extremity, will not 
perhaps be allowed to stay in the house long 
enough to finish his unseemly mirth. 

If God is to be taken away, then in heaven's 
name let us be serious about it, for it is an 
awfully serious matter. If the sweetest hope 
of the human heart, the hope that keeps it 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 165 

from breaking, the hope of a hereafter and a 
reunion, is to be smitten in the face and buried 
out of sight, then let us put ashes on our head 
and sing a requiem, for it is the world's 
funeral. The lips that laughed and made the 
world to laugh over the loss of hope and the 
eclipse of heaven are stilled forever now, and 
may God deal mercifully with the man who 
was so ready to answer heartaches with a wit- 
ticism and the hungry cry of the soul with "the 
laughter of fools" ! 

But our friend of the allegory goes further 
than mere negation. He does not know, and 
that settles it. What he does not know is not 
knowable. What he does not know does not 
exist. I once passed a fisherman on the Saint 
Lawrence who had been at work all the morn- 
ing but without success. He had fished and 
fished and had taken nothing. Now he said 
promptly and emphatically, "There are no fish 
in the river"; and the great river rolled on 
from the Lakes to the sea and was not dis- 
turbed, and the countless fish sported in the 
swift dark waters without knowing that they 
had been outlawed. 

I once knew a surgeon who searched the 
brain with his instruments of steel and his 
microscope, and said, "There is no soul, for I 
have looked for it and have not found it here" ; 



166 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

and the soul went on dreaming its mighty 
dreams and building empires. I once knew 
an astronomer who wandered from star to star 
along the hither edges of creation, and when 
he stepped down from the telescope he said, 
"There is no God; I have looked for his face 
along the Milky Way and have searched the 
starry systems for his footsteps, and behold 
he is not here." And the heavens went right 
on declaring the glory of God, and the firma- 
ment went right on showing his handiwork. 

But Hopeful met the doubter's doubt when 
he said : "What ! no Mount Zion ? Did we not 
see from the Delectable Mountains the gate 
of the city?" There is no answer to expe- 
rience. There is no argument with the man 
who says, "I know whom I have believed." 
There is no use reasoning with the man who 
says, "Whereas once I was blind, now I see." 

What we have felt and seen 

With confidence we tell ; 
And publish to the sons of men 

The signs infallible. 

Let me tell you a story. It is not in the 
Bible. It is not in the Talmud nor the Tar- 
gum nor the Mishna nor in any of the To- 
sephta; you may not find it even in the Lives 
of the Saints or the Vitae Patrum Eremitico- 
rum. And what you cannot find there is very 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 167 

rare indeed. But it contains a truth and you 
may take it along with the other oddities of 
this ancient Dream. Once upon a time a com- 
mittee was appointed by the scribes and Phari- 
sees to wait upon Lazarus in his Bethany home 
and to prove to him that he had not been raised 
from the dead; that such a miracle was un- 
thinkable and would be subversive of the laws 
of nature. There was no doubt that he had 
died — this could be proved by competent wit- 
nesses and was a reasonable hypothesis ; but as 
a resurrection under the circumstances was im- 
possible, the fact was that he was still dead. 
Now, it was contrary to law and to custom for 
a dead man to be walking the streets or min- 
gling with his living neighbors. A tremendous 
mistake had been made. He was the victim 
of a gigantic delusion and he owed it to him- 
self and to coming generations to correct the 
error by going back and having himself buried 
over again. It is said that Mary was greatly 
exercised by these arguments, their cogency, 
their conclusiveness, and she went over and 
laid her hand on her brother's shoulder. It is 
said that Lazarus could not for a moment 
think just how to answer this wise committee ; 
and it is further said that Martha arose quietly 
and with dignity and showed the committee 
the door. 



NIGHT THE TENTH 
ALL HAIL! AND WELCOME 



; 



What if some morning, when the stars were paling, 
And the dawn whitened, and the east was clear, 

Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence 
Of a benignant Spirit standing near : 

And I should tell him as he stood beside me, 
"This is our Earth — most friendly Earth, and fair, 

Daily its sea and shore through sun and shadow 
Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air : 

"There is blest living here, loving and serving, 
And quest of truth, and serene friendships dear ; 

But stay not, Spirit ! Earth has one destroyer — 
His name is Death; flee, lest he find thee here!" 

And what if then, while the still morning brightened, 
And freshened in the elm the summer's breath, 

Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel, 
And take my hand and say, "My name is Death." 

— Edward Rowland Sill. 




NIGHT THE TENTH 

All Hail! and Welcome 

E enter upon this last evening 
with more or less of regret. We 
are about to lose an old friend. 
For some weeks we have fol- 
lowed his adventures, shared his 
joys, and sympathized with his fears. He 
leaves us to-night. This is indeed nothing less 
than his funeral service. But why need it be 
sad ? The Bible never goes into mourning be- 
cause of death. It never hangs crape on the 
door. Its men and women fall asleep, or are 
gathered to their fathers, or God takes them. 
They do not die in the dreary, desolate, hope- 
less sense suggested by the drawn blinds and 
hushed voices of the typical funeral. "When 
I am dead, sing a psalm," whispered Susanna 
Wesley to her children who stood about her 
couch. We may be sure it was not the Nine- 
tieth Psalm with its dirge of human hopes, nor 
the Fifty-first Psalm with its bitter wail over 
human weakness ; but something with the sun- 
rise of morning gilding it, and the hallelujah 
of victory vibrating through it, for death in 
this case meant deliverance. 

171 



172 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

NOW, I saw in my dream that by this 
time the pilgrims were got over 
the Enchanted Ground; and enter- 
ing into the country of Beulah, whose air 
was very sweet and pleasant, the way lying 
directly through it, they solaced them- 
selves there for a season. Yea, here they 
heard continually the singing of birds, and 
saw every day the flowers appear in the 
earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in 
the land. In this country the sun shineth 
night and day; wherefore this was beyond 
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and 
also out of the reach of Giant Despair, 
neither could they from this place so much 
as see Doubting Castle. Here they were 
within sight of the city they were going to, 
also here met them some of the inhabitants 
thereof; for in this land the Shining Ones 
commonly walked, because it was upon the 
borders of heaven. In this land, also, the 
contract between the bride and the bride- 
groom was renewed; yea, here, "As the 
bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so did 
their God rejoice over them." Here they 
had no want of corn and wine; for in this 
place they met with abundance of what 
they had sought for in all their pilgrimage. 
Here they heard voices from out of the 
city, loud voices, saying, "Say ye to the 
daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



173 



cometh; behold, his reward is with him!" 
Here all the inhabitants of the country- 
called them, "The holy people, The re- 
deemed of the Lord, Sought out," etc. 



Beulah means married. Here there is the 
sweetest concord between the soul and the 
Saviour. God has joined together and no man 
has power to put asunder. Here the sincere 
follower of Christ can never be alone. The 
Divine Spirit, mightier than an archangel, gen- 
tler than our mother's voice, is vividly present 
to those who walk in Beulah. 

Nor need we wait this experience until the 
end of the path. Beulah land is sometimes en- 
tered long before we reach the river's brink. It 
often lieth hard by the wicket gate. It is the 
kingdom of Assurance, the favored land whose 
constitution is the eighth chapter of Romans, 
whose statute law is the "law of the spirit of 
life in Christ Jesus." He who walks with Jesus 
will sooner or later be freed of all evil com- 
panionship. Looking unto Christ we are 
changed; living with Christ we are trans- 
formed; abiding in Christ we are made like 
him. 

The Saviour comes and walks with me, 
And sweet communion here have we; 
He gently leads me by the hand, 
For this is heaven's borderland. 



174 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

As our pilgrims move toward the Celestial 
City, which is already in sight and blazing with 
a glory that dazzles them, they come upon a 
river deep and dark which they learn must be 
crossed. The river is there. Flesh and blood 
cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, and we 
are scheduled through to the kingdom. This 
mortal must put on immortality, and death 
alone can make the transformation. 

"And they were stunned and began to de- 
spair in their minds." The fear of death is 
the old fear that has shadowed the world for 
a thousand ages. It has held the race in bond- 
age. It has tempered the rejoicings in the 
birthchamber and sat as a skeleton at all our 
feasts. Claudio in "Measure for Measure" 
was but a little intensifying the voice of the 
human when he said : 

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
To what we fear of death." 

Yet it is not the same to all. The dream 
shows that "the river to some has its flowings, 
and what ebbings it has had while others have 
gone over. It has been in a manner dry for 
some, while it has overflowed its banks for 
others." There are some who daily walk with 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



175 



God but who tremble with horror unspeakable 
at the thought of death. Yet they are loyal 
and God loves them and they are his accepted 
children. There are others in whom the con- 
sciousness of the divine presence has wrought 
a perfect deliverance; who look forward to 
death as tranquilly as the tired laborer looks to 
the coming of the night, when he shall lie down 
to sleep and pleasant dreams. 

Payson in his last days claimed to be a 
"happy inhabitant of the land of Beulah." The 
River of Death was but an insignificant rill 
which could be crossed at a single step. Bishop 
Haven came down to the last and said, "I am 
sweeping into the light, and there is no river 
here." Mr. Moody stood on the border line 
and said, "No pain! no valley! I am in the 
gates. I have seen the children." The end 
may be dark or light, fearful with a great fear 
or exultant with a great hope, but the promise 
is to all, "When thou passest through the 
waters, I will be with thee; and through the 
rivers, they shall not overflow thee." 

Death has just as certainly a mission as life 
or prayer or faith. It is under orders. It is 
one of the servants of the King. With the 
advance of science and the broadening of faith 
we are ceasing to look upon it as a curse ; the 
mark of the divine disapproval ; the grisly exe- 



176 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

cutioner of God's awful retributive judgment. 
We are learning that these bodies were not in- 
tended to be permanent. They are for our use 
during a single stage of the tremendous evolu- 
tion through which we are passing. 

The earth does not exist for itself. With 
its wide prairies and fecund valleys it exists 
for the sake of the vegetation that roots itself 
in the soil. Plant life looks toward animal life 
as its reason and justification, and the animal 
still looks forward to man and the higher 
phases of his being. Professor Agassiz taught 
that as the Old Testament points toward the 
cross, so all creation points toward man, from 
the first embryonic life that quivered in the 
slimy ooze of prehistoric oceans through the 
myriad forms that throng the animate world; 
all are but foreshadowings and prophecies of 
humanity. 

"First that which is natural, afterward that 
which is spiritual." There is no halting any- 
where along the upward path. There is a 
change of cars at each apparent terminus, but 
no change of direction. We are superbly 
equipped for the world that now is, but we 
must make new adjustments for the world that 
is to come. The body cannot be taken with us 
beyond the present stage of the journey. There 
will be no solid path along which it may tread 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 177 

as we move on in our stately destiny and to- 
ward our splendid destination. The body will 
bide with its brother the clod, and the imper- 
ishable soul will appropriate imperishable ma- 
terial out of which to build its everlasting habi- 
tation. There must be, then, a divorce between 
the soul and the body. There must be a 
moving-out season and the hanging of the 
crane in a more suitable abode. 

This change we call death. It cannot be 
called the penalty of sin. It would be, in some 
form, if there had been no sin. It was, before 
the first sin had been committed. It is a postu- 
late arising from the relation between the flesh 
and the spirit. It is the deliverer of the soul 
from the bondage of the dust. It is the climax 
of life, the transition, the apotheosis. 

Yet we are told that death did not always 
exist. There was a time when life was so 
simple and unambitious that there was no de- 
sire for improvement. Cell generated cell 
without a struggle or a break. Then there 
came new ambitions and enlarged horizons. 
Life was no longer satisfied to reproduce itself 
merely. There came aspirations to do larger 
things. Then the old cells broke down and 
died that new and more abundant life might 
come. So death was born. Out of the desire 
for growth it came, and the old was willing to 



178 MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 

go down, if thereby the new might walk over 
the broken wrecks to grander possibilities. 

And death comes always bringing a blessing 
in its hands. Without it the whole economy 
of nature must be changed. According to the 
claims of Charles Darwin, animals increase at 
so high a rate that unless death interpose the 
earth would soon be covered by the progeny of 
a single pair. Even the elephant, the slowest 
breeder of all known animals, if left alone 
would soon possess the land. At the end of 
seven hundred and fifty years nineteen million 
elephants would be descended from a single 
pair. The Department of Agriculture is re- 
sponsible for the statement that, if undisturbed, 
the family of a single pair of English sparrows 
in ten years would number 275,716,983,698. 

On this, I presume, were based the calcula- 
tions of Bishop Randolph S. Foster. He gives 
ponderous and appalling figures to show that 
if there were no death, and this little creature 
should keep on producing its kind for two hun- 
dred years, at the end of that time the earth 
would be buried in mountain ranges of spar- 
rows covering every inch of the globe from 
pole to pole. A thousand years of man with- 
out death would leave no standing room on the 
planet, according to the Origin of Species. Na- 
ture must keep death at her right hand or move 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 179 

into a larger house. Like the philosopher 
Thomas Malthus, she realizes that the only way 
to improve society is to restrain population; 
that, everything else being equal, hungry 
mouths would soon outnumber corn-sheaves, 
and demand outstrip supply. 

Death is one of the agencies of civilization. 
Civilization grows great and luminous by the 
uplift of successive generations. Each age 
with its ideals and its splendid representatives 
does its work, then moves on to give place to 
the next. If there were no death the past 
would fetter the present. Worn-out theories, 
mildewed shibboleths, outgrown prejudices, 
would dominate the new thought of the day. 
Old tyrannies in the saddle would ride down 
incipient reforms. The creeds of our fathers 
would be our jailers. The funeral lamps from 
the tombs of the old prophets would "light the 
martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day." 

Suppose Richard III or Nero could have 
lived a thousand years and held authority to 
the end ! What an awful blight it would have 
been upon the race! But death came and the 
world breathed easier. Death sweeps away the 
old generation, and the new men who come into 
the kingdom bring with them all the lessons 
learned in the past, and new faith and new en- 
thusiasm to meet the new occasions and the 



i8o 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



new duties. Sometimes we are staggered by 
the appalling loss when some great leader falls. 
But the reins are taken up by a younger hand 
and the world moves steadily on. Moses look- 
ing back for the last time upon the tents of 
Israel sees the hosts preparing to march under 
the leadership of Joshua. The mantle of 
Elijah when wrapped together in the hand of 
Elisha opens the Jordan. One may decrease 
but the other must increase; the day wanes 
only toward the new day's dawning. 

Death brings the same enlargement to indi- 
viduals. It breaks down barriers and widens 
horizons. I remember reading when a boy an 
article picturing the close of the first day in 
Eden — the going down of the sun, the slow 
darkening of the skies, the hush of the birds, 
the restless uneasiness of the beasts at the un- 
canny gloom; and how an awful sense of un- 
certainty and loss came to the man and woman 
— the impression that the end was coming so 
soon after the beginning; the helplessness and 
dread as the light faded and the darkness fell. 
Then one by one the stars appeared, silent, 
alert, self-confident, friendly; and when the 
skies were crowded with the flaming hosts, then 
Adam realized that his loss had been splendid 
gain. Instead of one sun there were a thou- 
sand ; a canopy blazing with beauty that would 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



181 



not have been discovered if the sun had not set ; 
a heaven all aglow, unseen and unsuspected 
until the earth became dark. 

Joseph Blanco White has emphasized this 
thought in one of the most beautiful sonnets in 
the language: 

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 

This glorious canopy of light and blue? 

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 

And lo ! creation widened in man's view. 

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find, 

Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, 
That to such endless orbs thou mad'st us blind ! 

Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife? 

If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life? 

May not this be the mission of death — to 
darken the day so that the night may shine ? to 
fling a curtain over the glimmering light of the 
life that now is, in order that the radiance and 
effulgence of the life that is to come may stand 
revealed ? 

And after death — what? Only the Book 
can answer this question with authority. 
Everything else is guesswork or inference. 
The Bible teaches very distinctly the dual 
nature of man; that we are body and soul, 



182 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



really body and soul and spirit. It very em- 
phatically shows that the body will some day 
go to pieces and that the soul will be released. 
In graphic pictures it represents the coming of 
death, the loosing of the silver cord, the break- 
ing of the golden bowl, and "then shall the dust 
return to the earth as it was: and the 
spirit shall return unto God who gave it." 
Whether that spirit shall go back to God as 
the rivers run down to the sea and are swal- 
lowed up in the sea, or whether it goes back to 
dwell with him as a living, thinking, intelligent 
entity, is not stated here. 

The Bible teaches eternal life, that is, life in 
eternity. It blazes with the glorious theme. It 
sounds all the deeps of vivid poetry and all the 
breadths of mighty prose in the elaboration of 
this great thought. "The wages of sin is 
death; but the gift of God is eternal life." "I 
give unto my sheep eternal life." "Lord, to 
whom shall we go? thou hast the words of 
eternal life." It speaks as definitely of the 
future as of the present, of eternity as of time. 
Paul refers to death and its experience as if he 
were planning another pilgrimage to Jerusalem 
or another preaching tour through Asia Minor. 

It rises to the very climax of rapture and en- 
thusiasm as it attempts to describe that house 
not made with hands, the house of the re- 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 183 

deemed. The gates are of pearl and the 
foundations of precious stones, and the streets 
are of virgin gold and the waters clear as crys- 
tal flowing through smiling valleys. But does 
the Bible anywhere declare that immortality is 
the natural attribute of the human soul ? Plato 
gives us the phrase "immortal soul." It is not 
found in the Bible. This theory goes back to 
the ancient Egyptians, and it came into the 
early Church through the fathers and now is 
held by many as a necessary creed of the 
Church. 

Argument after argument has been pressed 
by the mightiest thinkers to prove that the soul 
is in itself immortal ; that nothing can destroy 
it ; that in its very nature it must endure as long 
as God shall endure ; and yet so plainly does the 
Book say that "God only hath immortality, 
dwelling in the light which no man can ap- 
proach unto." 

Does not the Bible speak of immortality as 
a result to be reached, an object to be gained, 
not a condition in which we are born? God 
breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life 
— so runs the beautiful record — and man be- 
came a living soul. And now, that he might 
be an ever-living soul, God planted the tree of 
life within the garden. But later God doomed 
the man to die, and then was he kept away 



184 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



from the tree that perhaps would have made 
his living soul an immortal soul. Mighty fact 
is this, or immense allegory that stands for 
awful truth, unreachable save in terms of 
childlike simplicity that all the world can un- 
derstand. 

Immortality seems to be held by the Bible 
as a condition to be sought. Paul speaks of 
two classes of persons: those who are con- 
tentious and do not obey the truth, and those 
who by patient continuance in welldoing seek 
after glory, honor, and immortality. To these 
latter God will render eternal life. This is the 
Book, and it is not safe to go beyond the Book. 

To be sure, there are apparently powerful 
arguments for natural immortality : in the mar- 
velous grip of the brain, the mighty sweep of 
the intellect, holding dominion as it does over 
all the great forces of the natural world; and 
in our moral nature, which recognizes the 
power of right and turns away from the wrong. 
But these arguments may prove too much. 
There is very little good we possess which is 
not possessed in some degree by the dog or the 
elephant. The difference between the highest 
grade of beast and the lowest grade of man is 
not always in the man's favor. There are some 
horses that seem to have a clearer sense of 
right and wrong than some men. It is not safe 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 185 

to say, "I think, therefore I am immortal," un- 
less we are ready to include in our immortality 
the crow that can count thirty, or that can dis- 
tinguish an umbrella from a shotgun; or the 
fox which throws the hounds off the scent by 
wading a stream, and then sits and laughs at 
their discomfiture. 

But there is immortality. The souls that go 
out on the great mysterious sea of the future 
under the guidance of the Divine Pilot shall 
sail there forever under unclouded skies and 
amid spice-laden breezes. The Bible offers it 
under certain conditions, and Science has not 
a word to say in contradiction. On the con- 
trary, the tendency of present-day thinking is 
to look for something of this. Evolution is one 
of the master words of the age. And by evolu- 
tion I mean not a theory as to the origin of 
the world, but an explanation of its order ; not 
a substitute for God, but a special method 
adopted by God in managing the universe. In- 
deed, it does seem as if God is more mightily, 
more magisterially present in evolution than in 
any other world-plan. 

The great principle of evolution is more life : 
the original germ becoming Monera, then 
Polyzoa, then through all the gradations up to 
man — each change made by the constant up- 
ward pressure of life reaching out into wider 



i86 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



fields and into higher elevations. This process 
has attained its highest reach on earth and in 
time; why not put one more step to the stair- 
case and so scale the heavens? why not put 
one more pier to the bridge and so connect with 
the shores of eternity ? Immortality lies along 
the path of evolution : the lower orders of crea- 
tion struggling toward the higher, the forms 
that are prone straightening up and standing 
erect, the fish-eaters and root-diggers develop- 
ing into Isaiahs and Isaac Newtons and Glad- 
stones. This is the teaching of modern science. 
Who shall now say to this stupendous march 
of event and of elaboration, "Thus far shalt 
thou go, and no further"? They tell us that 
wheels have started; dare they tell us the 
wheels have stopped ? They have watched the 
process of growth until the original germ has 
become a man. Now let us keep our eyes on 
the dial, for by the same reasoning man will 
become an angel. 

Here, then, is the testimony of Science, the 
young but mighty sister of Revealed Truth; 
a glorious preacher of the resurrection and im- 
mortality; and thus does Science offer to the 
man whose face is toward the hills that which 
has been offered the lower orders, a future and 
a growth. 

The servant of God has eternity in his soul. 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 187 

His feet are on the upgrade, and the top of the 
mountain along whose slope he climbs is out of 
sight in the far-off blue. He feels springing 
within him already a strength that shall never 
tire and a life that shall never cease. 

In a season of calm weather 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea. 

And on that sea we shall launch our ships by 
and by. 

Some weeks ago I crossed the ferry to Man- 
hattan in a thick fog. A gray curtain shut 
off the shores, and objects could not be seen 
halfway across the boat. Sounds were muffled 
and all the world was still. It was as if we 
were drifting through space millions of miles 
from any life. Suddenly from the ferry slip 
which we were cautiously approaching came 
the sound of a bell. How weird it sounded, 
how eerie it seemed, breaking out of the pall 
of mist and through the mysterious silence! 
And I said to myself, "Ah, the city is there, 
and there is the landing place and solid ground 
and friends." And so as we drift through the 
years of life, slowly, painfully pushing ahead, 
dark-shadowed, danger-beset, alone, there 
comes to us occasionally out of the great be- 
yond a voice, or the fragment of a song, or the 



i88 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



sound of the harbor bell, and we grip the helm 
with steadier hand and catch our breath for 
new endeavor, for the landing place is just 
ahead, and all will be well. 

Then all hail, Death! the Revealer of se- 
crets; the Consoler of griefs; the unfaltering 
Guide to lead us into yet untrodden fields ; the 
Prophet of a new dispensation; the mightiest 
ministering Angel of the King of kings, with 
brow of light and pinions of mercy. And may 
we be ready for thy coming, for thy face is 
said to be like unto the face of the Son of man. 



THEY then addressed themselves to 
the water; and entering, Christian 
began to sink, and crying out to his 
good friend Hopeful, he said, "I sink in 
deep waters ; the billows go over my head, 
all his waves go over me ! Selah." 

Then said the other, "Be of good cheer, 
my brother; I feel the bottom, and it is 
good." 

Christian, therefore, presently found 
ground to stand upon ; and so it fol- 
lowed that the rest of the river was but 
shallow. Thus they got over. Now, upon 
the bank of the river, on the other side, 
they saw the two Shining Men again, who 
there waited for them. Wherefore, being 
come out of the river, they saluted them, 



WITH THE GREAT DREAMER 



189 



saying, "We are ministering spirits, sent 
forth to minister for them who shall be 
heirs of salvation." Thus they went along 
toward the gate. 

Now, you must note that the city stood 
upon a mighty hill, but the pilgrims went 
up that hill with ease, because they had 
these two men to lead them up by the 
arms; also, they had left their mortal gar- 
ments behind them in the river, for though 
they went in with them, they came out 
without them. They therefore went up 
here with much agility and speed, though 
the foundation upon which the city was 
framed was higher than the clouds. They 
therefore went up through the regions of 
the air, sweetly talking as they went, being 
comforted, because they safely got over the 
river, and had such glorious companions 
to attend them. 

Now, while they were thus drawing to- 
ward the gate, behold, a company of the 
heavenly host came out to meet them; to 
whom it was said, by the other two Shin- 
ing Ones, "These are the men that have 
loved our Lord when they were in the 
world, and that have left all for his holy 
name; and he hath sent us to fetch them, 
and we have brought them thus far on 
their desired journey, that they may go in 
and look their Redeemer in the face with 



190 



MIDSUMMER NIGHTS 



joy." Then the heavenly host gave a great 
shout, saying, "Blessed are they which are 
called unto the marriage supper of the 
Lamb." 

Now, I saw in my dream that these two 
men went in at the gate; and lo! as they 
entered, they were transfigured, and they 
had raiment put on them that shone like 
gold. There was also that met them with 
harps and crowns, and gave them to them 
— the harps to praise withal, and the 
crowns in token of honor. Then I heard 
in my dream that all the bells in the city 
rang again for joy, and that it was said 
unto them, "Enter ye into the joy of your 
Lord." I also heard the men themselves, 
that they sang with a loud voice, saying, 
"Blessing, and honor, and glory, and 
power, be unto him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and unto the Lamb, forever and 
ever." 

So I awoke, and, behold, it was a dream. 



INDEX 



Addison, 84 
Agassiz, 176 
Agnostic, 161 
Alden, John, 146 
Alexandrian Library, 156 
Allen, Grant, 161 
Alexius, Death of, 141 
Alps, 56 
Andree, 141 
Apollyon, 73 
Armor, Christian, 67 
Arnold, Matthew, 25 
Assurance, 173 
Athanasius, Exile of, 18 
Athenians, 155 
Atheist, 1 59 
Atlanta, 75 



Church, The, S3, 57, 63 
Claudio, 174 

Cleveland, Duchess of, 98 
Cleveland, Grover, 163 
Coldstream Guards, 101 
Coleridge, 2 

Colorado, Canyon of, 8 
Columbus, 15, 143 
Conceit, Country of, 154 
Confession, Romish, 22 
Conscience Unreliable, 141 
Conversion, Nature of, 40 
Cook, Joseph, xi 
Corporations, The, 59 
Cortez, 156 
Crusades, The, 45 
Cyprian, Martyrdom of, 106 



Bacon, Lord, 156 Daniel, 95 

Beecher, H. W., 58 Dante a Politician, 95 

Beulah, Land of, 173 Darwin, Charles, 178 

Bible, The, 5, 65, 81, 119, David, 65 

128, 137, 171, 182, 183 Death, a friend of man, 178 
Boston, Streets of, 30 Birth of, 177 

Braddock, Defeat of, 154 River of, 175 

Brainerd, Conversion of, 41 Declaration of Independ- 



Bratts, Ned, 
Brooks, Phillips, 23 
Browning, x 



Caesar, 75 

Canaan, Language of, 103 

Candor, Advantage of, 27 

Carlyle, Thomas, on Con- 
version, 42 
on Clothes, 100 

Carton, Sydney, Death of, Dorchester, Countess of, 
116 Doubting Castle, 113 

Cato, 84 Doubts, no, 118 

Cecil, Richard, 96 Dreadful Night, City of, 26 

191 



ence, 56 
Defeat, 75 

Delectable Mountains, 133 
Dickens, Charles, 116 
Diffidence, wife of Giant 

Despair, 125 
or Self-consciousness, 

126 
Discretion, 63 
Donatello, 123 



192 



INDEX 



East River, 119 
Elijah on Carmel, 89 
Enemy, Value of an, 79 
Ericson, Leif, 142 
Ethical Culture, 11 
Euclid, 32 
Evangelist, 9 
Evolution, 185 
Experience, 142 
Ezekiel, 32 

Faithful, 89 
Fame, Hall of, 117 
Faustus, Dr., 116 
Fear in Religion, 6 
Flaubert's Madame Bovary, 

116 
Florence, 123 
Foster, Bishop, and Death, 

178 
Fox, George, 102 
France, Revolution in, 57 

Galileo, 156 
Ganges, 147 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 

Germany, Civilization of, 

60 
Gettysburg, Battle of, 45 
Gideon, 65 

Gladstone, William E., 95 
God, Freedom of, 25 

Honesty of, 28 

Misconception of, 122, 
137 
Goldsmith, Oliver, xi 
Good- will, 21 
Guilt, Sense of, 7, 17 
Gulliver's Travels, ix 

Hadley, Conversion of, 41 
Haeckel, 25 
Hafiz, The World, 93 
Hartmann, 25 

Haven, Bishop, Death of, 
175 



Hillis, Newell Dwight, 2 
Honest, Mr., 126 
Hopeful, hi 

House Beautiful, The, 53 
Humiliation, Valley of, 73 
Huntingdon, Lady, 94 
Huss, John, Death of, 82 

Ibsen, Henrik, view of 
heredity, 25 

Ignorance, 152 

Immortal Soul, Plato's con- 
ception of, 183 

Immortality, Natural, 183 
Conditional, 184 

India, Civilization of, 60 

Interpreter, House of, 37 

Jailer, The Philippian, 13 

James II, 154 

James, Professor, on Con- 
version, 42 

Jefferson, Thomas, 56 

Jekyll, Dr., and Mr. Hyde, 
78 

Jerome, 17 

Job, 81 

Johnson, Dr., 102 

Kant, father of agnosti- 
cism, 161 
Khayyam, Omar, 26 
Kipling, Rudyard, 83 
Knowledge, 140 

Laputa, Island of, ix 
Lazarus, 120, 167 
Lecky, 158 

Levity, Unseasonable, 164 
Library, Alexandrian, 156 

Sunday school, 138 
Life, Eternal, 182 
Light, Universal^ 158 
Lowell, "The Crisis," 36 
Luther, Martin, 58 
Lydia, 137 



INDEX 



i93 



Maartens, Maarten, on he- 
redity, 25 
Macaulay, 2 
Macbeth, Lady, 39 
Malthus, Thomas, 179 
Martineau, conception of 

miracles, 121 
Martyn, Henry, 95 
McKinley, William, 95 
Mephistopheles, 116 
Milky Way, 166 
Mill, John Stuart, 157, 161 
Miller, Daisy, 115 
Millinery, Church, 100 
Miracles, Place of, 121 
Monera, 185 
Moody, Death of, 175 
Moses, Choice of, 92 

Neptune, Planet, 48 

Nero, 179 

Newspapers, Sunday, in 

England, 105 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 186 
New York, Sky line of, 104 
Night, The First, 180 

Oceans, 44 

Depth of, 46 
(Edipus, 116 
Ostian Road, 82 
Othello, 24 

Pandora, 62 

Paul, 82, 93 

Payson, Last days of, 175 

Pentateuch, Author of, 157 

Persius, 88 

Peter and ornament, 99 

Pharaoh, 92 

Plato, Dialogues, 151 

on Immortality, 183 
Pliable, 12 
Plutarch's Lives, x 
Prayer, 127 
Presumption, 55 
Promise, 127 



Puritan objections to Pil- 
grim's Progress, 4 

Quakers, Garb of, 102 

Reuss, 120 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 155 
Richard III, 179 
Ridpath, 94 
Romans, eighth chapter, 

138, 139 
Rome, Burning of, 27 
Rule, Golden, 30 

Saint Lawrence River, 165 
Saul of Tarsus, Conversion 

of, 13, 4i 
Savonarola, 95, 106 
Schopenhauer, 25 
Sermonettes, ix 
Shakespeare, 116, 158 
Sherman at Atlanta, 75 
Sill, Edward Rowland, 170 
Simple, 54 

Sin, Conviction of, 8, 42 
Sincere, 145 

Slavery, American, 45, 58 
Sloth, 54 

Slough of Despond, 15 
Smith, Adam, 56 
Social Problems, 14 
Socialism, 60 
Sodom, 8 
Sophocles, 116 
Sorrento, ix 
Spencer, Herbert, 161 
Spenser, Faerie Queene, 3 
Standish, Miles, 146 
Starbuck, Professor, on 

Conversion, 42 

Tables of Stone, 66 

Tennyson, no 

Theology, Sunday school, 

US 
Thirty Years' War, 45 



194 

Tiberius on Capri, 39 
Triton, 162 



INDEX 



Ulrici and the 

body, 7 
Universe, Breadth of, 47 

Valjean, Jean, 116 
Valley Forge, 15 
Vanity Fair, 90 
Verne, Jules, 47 



'56 
Death 



Washington, Mount, 140 
Watchful, 144 
"Wealth of Nations, 
spiritual Wesley, John, 58 
Wesley, Susanna, 

of, 171 
Wharton, Edith, 72 
White, Joseph Blanco, 181 
World, The, its meaning, 

93, 94 
Worldliness, 97 



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